


The Lost Weekend

by terebi_me



Category: Blur
Genre: Cocaine, Drug Abuse, Fear and Loathing, Gen, Heavy Angst, Heroin, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, LSD, Mdma, Obsessive Behavior, Psychotropic Drugs, Recreational Drug Use, bad trip, good trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 18:44:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8679118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terebi_me/pseuds/terebi_me
Summary: A heartbroken, guilt-ridden, self-loathing Damon Albarn decides to spend a weekend in the privacy of a country house, alone, with a very well-stocked cache of drugs of all imaginable types. Half daredevil, half death wish, he decides to take them all. A bit like meditating on the sufferings of Christ in the desert, trying to fight the temptations and tortures of Satan. Only it's Damon Albarn and a life-threatening pile of drugs vs. himself.Inspired by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Lost Weekend (the film starring Ray Milland), and Dogs in Space, as well as the lyrics, music, and real-life event inspiration for the Blur albums Blur and 13.This is a work of complete fiction.





	1. no distance left

He spent a lot of time in the flat as things were being moved around in it, silently refusing to move for hours as workmen shifted Justine's things out and into waiting vans. For a few hours on Monday, Justine was there, directing the workmen about fragile things or things that weren't labelled as hers that she's changed her mind on, that she now wanted to keep. Damon never contradicted her. Let her have the things. It wasn't unreasonable. They were mostly things they bought together, that Damon had always considered to be his, but if she wanted them... what use did he have for _things_ now, anyway?

Justine tried to ignore him at first, but she backed into him carrying an antique Moroccan end table, and lost her reasonable cool. She'd been so cool, all this time. "Look, Damon, would you just fucking move? You're in my way. You're in _everyone's way_."

Damon said nothing, but ducked his head autistically, cowering. The tears that he thought he couldn't access started to spill out. Justine set down the table and hit him in the head with the back of her fist. She paused as if ready to say something, but then just picked up the table and continued out with it. She didn't come back.

It was over. He knew it would end this way. For some reason he'd managed to deny it, to mask it, hide it - there were always so many distractions, so much of "Justine's got her own life, she'll be fine, she won't mind"... For God's sake. He hadn't been deceptive, he just didn't mention some things. For example, a young woman seven months' pregnant with his child. He just hadn't gotten around to telling her. She had to read about it in the paper. Like so many other women. And the press was never, ever going to leave him alone again.

Fuck, how could he have been so stupid?

After the movers had gone, he stayed in the middle of the drawing room floor and remembered the way he'd felt when Suzi Winstanley told him she was going to have his baby. JOY. Wild joy. Because he wanted a kid so badly. He'd always wanted a kid to bring up. Finally it was going to happen. And it never had with Justine; she always had so many good reasons why she didn't want to get pregnant right then. And they were damn good reasons.

Oh, Christ, she was gone, his best friend in the world besides Graham, and his hero, and his muse, and his idol, and he loved her and everything she did so much that he had to run roughshod over her life, and her music, and her career, and her public image. And now she'd done what any smart, self-reliant tough cookie would do. What he would have done in her place, ages ago. Years ago. From the time that he first came back from a tour with love bites, and they weren't from Graham or Alex. And the time that he'd come back and couldn't make love to her because he had to let the antibiotics take effect first or he'd infect her, and he couldn't tell her exactly why because he had a hard time remembering it himself. And the times that he'd said he was going out with Graham or Jamie, and he had every intention of doing that, but somehow he ended up in a strange perfumey-soft bed with a smart, artsy brunette who liked it doggy-style.

The press were outside. He just knew it. He stayed in.

When darkness began to fall he had his "evening's recreation". Before today, he would wait until full dark had come, or better yet, early morning, just before dawn, to soothe himself to sleep. Today, there was no point in waiting any longer. Whose face was he saving?

Towards the end of the last tour, Damon had badly sprained a ligament, doing something idiotic on stage, he didn't remember what. The pain, at the time, had been excruciating, and he'd had to do a lot of coke backstage before he could convince himself to do an encore. But he'd done three fat lines, and then gasped to his bandmates, "Only one more - 'Yuko and Hiro'." And they'd hemmed and hawed, but they did it, and it was gorgeous. However, by the second verse, the pain had devastated him, and he'd left the mike and the stage to resounding screams. ("One of Albarn's best ever... the longing expressed in the song choked him up so severely that he broke down and had to leave the stage!" gushed his favourite fanzine.) Then Damon went straight to the hospital, certain that he'd re-broken that foot.

But no, it was just a glorified sprained ankle, albeit a nasty one, and the young ER doctor, being a massive Blur fan who had sadly missed the show, happily wrote Damon a scrip for 100 Vicodin tablets. Damon had never had Vicodin before, but he took some immediately and found it fabulous. "Wrap the ankle and be nice to it, but I'd hate for you to miss any shows," said the doctor.

And then he winked. Damon loved California.

So the ligament healed up pretty fast, but he still had all these Vicodin, and they made him sleepy, so he didn't take them too often. One recent evening, bored after a shitty day, he'd poured all the pills into a dish, then licked the powder residue at the bottom of the bottle from his palm. The effect was nearly immediate and very intense - it was a pure rush of pleasurable relaxation. He felt so good he managed to remain calm and reasonable when Justine called him about something she'd read.

After that, he took to crushing the Vicodin tablets into powder with a mortar and pestle, then adding water or fruit juice and slugging it down. First it had been one tablet, then two. He took it before he went to sleep.

Damon crushed three tablets in the mortar, tapped them carefully into a plastic sports bottle, then added some organic apple juice and shook it up. When it formed a pleasing vortex in the middle, he sucked it down in seven hard swallows. Then he went and sat on the couch.

Justine had taken the bed.

He began to fiddle with the telephone, wondering if he should call his therapist, but then thought, _What would I tell him? That I'm sitting alone in a complete dark flat, and Justine's just left me, and I'm thinking about mixing that Vicodin powder with water and cooking it up and shooting it into my veins?_ Instead he fiddled with the answerphone. He hit the play button and listened to the last message.

"Hello? Hello Damon? This is Suzi. I guess it's all right if I call you here now. Right? I had an ultrasound today. You want to know? You told me you'd want to know. It's a girl. That means you're happy. I hope you're happy." So wistful. As if she didn't know that she had him, she had him for good now, that forever now, he'd be Dad and she'd be Mum.

Oh, Christ. Forever without Justine. Forever. She was gone forever. He had lost her forever. He was shit, lower than shit, because at least shit gives something back to the earth. All he'd ever done was take.

He lay back on the couch and thought for a while, twiddling his thumbs. He came to a decision. He was going to get out of this mind for a while. He had to get out of this flat, that was for sure. He'd sell it. He ought to just get out of England, or better yet, off the planet. For now, he'd settle into getting out of reality.


	2. remind me there's something else

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damon tries to find a co-conspirator for his lost weekend amongst the only people who might have an inkling of who he really is as a person - his bandmates.
> 
> Warning for angst and self-loathing self-talk.

Damon didn't want to go alone, of course. He wanted one companion \- no more than that, most likely. Just a boy's weekend out. He'd done it a lot when he was younger, just fucking off to a festival, or a pub crawl around an obscure suburb. Why couldn't he still do that? He wasn't quite thirty yet.

On Tuesday, after dealing with some housing issues, he rang up Graham. Graham was the first logical choice. He and Damon had drifted apart a great deal on the last tour, and Damon had been longing to put it right again for a long time. Too long, really. They met for lunch and, after a few casual assurances that he was all right, Damon made his pitch.

"This weekend. Us, alone in a nice big farmhouse in Sussex - totally quiet, racehorse paddocks all round. A pool. And a thousand pounds' worth of drugs." Damon sat back, a triumphant smile on his face. It couldn't possibly fail.

"You what?" Graham looked aghast.

"Think of it, man. It's all arranged. It's all paid for. Place is stocked. It's Dave Balfe's; you know it. It's a very big house?" Damon hinted.

"What, the - the sheep farm?"

"No, the other one. 'S near Newmarket, remember, the one he got for a steal because he sold most of the paddock land to the other farms? S' kick ass, you remember, you went there for that - that -" Damon waved his hand so that he could avoid saying _"That party for that EMI chap's daughter's birthday, where you were ill in the front garden three times and tried to punch Alex?"_ "That one party."

Apparently, Graham remembered that party as well. He grimaced. "No, Damon, I can't."

"What? Oh, c'mon, Graham."

"No," Graham said flatly. "I've quit drink." He glanced at Damon's pint, a little accusingly, but then looked Damon in the eye with a clear and direct gaze. It wasn't one Damon was used to seeing - when sober, he was usually so shy. "And that means no drugs, either. If - no listen to me, Damon. If I get high, I'll want a drink. And then then I won't feel like stopping. I can't control it. If I stand a chance of kicking the piss, I can't. I owe it to myself, and I owe it to you lot."

Damon felt horrible for having the pint without even asking Graham first if it was all right. Graham had been straight for months. Months. Graham. Damon guessed that the fact that he wasn't even aware of it was a good sign in and of itself. "Yeah," he conceeded. "You're right."

"You'll be all right," Graham said as if stating a law of physics. "You're always all right." He took a big swallow of his water and winked and smiled.

***

Wednesday Damon met Alex for lunch.

Alex was at home, having lunch in, mostly exotic fruit, to suit Damon's tastes. Damon really preferred apples, but he appreciated the gesture, and ate a lot of bread and tapenade and cheese and slices of starfruit. There was also Turkish coffee and excellent hashish. Damon relaxed and began to get his hopes up. Surely an avowed sensualist like Alex wouldn't mind rolling around in the grass and reminding him what the point of living actually was?

He was stoned enough to not bring it up while lunch was being eaten, but afterwards, when they retired to the study, Damon readied his pitch. To his alarm, a young Japanese girl in a fluffy robe, carrying a towel and a bottle of oil, stood in the study by Alex's chair. She saw them come in and grinned. Damon turned to Alex with a huge-eyed grin. "You don't mean!" he said.

"I'm having a reflexology massage, you dirty old man. I just like to order in, rather than having to go into town someplace. It's perfectly innocent." Alex walked up to the girl and pinched her lightly on the cheek. "Isn't it, Momo?" he growled softly at her.

She blinked one eye in an annoyed way then turned the same cheerful blank smile back to Damon. Damon shook himself and sprawled on the sofa with his glass of wine. "So Alex, I have a proposition to make you."

Alex rolled up his trouser cuffs and sat down, and the girl began to wash his feet. It was fairly mesmerizing and Damon struggled to keep his mind on the point. "A proposition, eh?" Alex said cheerfully. "We're not gonna snog for the cameras, are we? I hate your breath."

"I hate _your_ breath, you stinky fucker," Damon countered, deadpan. Alex chuckled. "No, um... I've got Balfe's house in Sussex for the weekend, and... and whole lot of drugs."

"What sort of drugs?" asked Alex without missing a beat.

"Oh, all sorts. All the sorts I like, anyway."

"Oh, God, that's everything." Alex snorted and tossed his head; Damon answered with a laugh. "Ah. This weekend, eh? Can't. Not this weekend. Maybe in March? Do drugs go bad?"

"Why not this weekend?" Damon demanded.

"I'm going out with this young American actress that I've been chasing for a long time," Alex said, gazing with condescending adoration at the Asian girl scrubbing his feet with a natural loofah and what looked like some kind of seaweed paté. It smelled great, though. "She's really straight-edge. I can't even drink when I'm around her. Therefore, the affair is doomed. Pity." His voice sounded anything but. "I figure, I get into her knickers, then fuck off to the Groucho for some Chateau Lafitte. Maybe Sunday evening I'll come up, if you're still going to be there, but ... all day Friday, all day Saturday. She's very demanding." A slow smile spread across his face. "She didn't know me from Adam. She'd never heard of Blur. It's so fucked up."

"I bet she knows us now," Damon sighed.

"Oh, yeah. She's seen all our videos." Alex wiggled his clean, buffed toes, being rubbed dry. "She thinks you're ugly."

Damon struggled to find this funny, but managed to just barely get there. "Yeah, well. You stink."

"No one seems to mind," Alex sang. "Hey - want a reflexology massage? Momo won't mind. I'll buy."

Momo looked up at Alex with a strange sort of pleading on her face. Damon couldn't tell if it was because she was so embarrassed at being offered up like this, or because she wanted Damon to leave so that she could attack Alex. "God, no," Damon said after a stoned moment where he was just staring at the girl's flushed, dewy cheeks, seeing that freaky electricity between her and Alex. That flash; you wanted to see it in as many pairs of eyes as possible; it was addictive. He was going to have to kick it. And yet that shock of lust was only a fraction of what he had with Justine. Had. In the Past. Back then when she didn't know what a jerk he was. "No more girls," Damon said firmly. "They're what got me into this mess in the first place."

Even Alex didn't have a snappy comeback for that, and he fell silent and contemplative.

It was a drag; he was bringing everyone down along with him...

Shit, lower than shit...

***

Thursday night he had Dave over for dinner. Just Dave; no Paula, he'd asked for just Dave. Damon spent the afternoon in a state, wondering if Graham or Alex had rung up Dave and told him about the wild concept, and whether or not Dave was actually going to show up, so he had a two-tablet "evening's refreshment" and then had a glass of wine. By the time Dave showed up, relatively on time, Damon was coasting around the kitchen, occasionally pausing to toss the salad a little bit more.

"You're dancing on air tonight," Dave remarked, looking around the foyer and drawing room, now about half as furnished as they used to be.

"I had a few before you came," Damon sighed, grinning. "I've been a little out of sorts."

"You doing all right?" Dave asked, picking at the salad.

"Why do people keep asking me that?" said Damon in a panic.

Dave arched his eyebrows, chewing on the berry he'd snagged. "Because you just came off a bad tour, your girlfriend left you, your new girlfriend is pregnant, and the whole fucking world is breathing down your neck? Maybe that has something to do with it. Pardon me for asking."

Damon slumped into a chair. "Dave... are you busy this weekend?"

"Of course I'm busy, why?"

"I'm going to Balfe's house in Sussex to basically take a ton of drugs and get out of myself. I was hoping... I was hoping for some stupid reason that you'd like to come." Damon glanced around for his glass, but it was in the other room, and now that he was sitting down, he really didn't want to get up again.

Dave seemed puzzled. "Well, I mean... I mean, shit. It sounds like it might be fun. But a, I'm busy, and b, it also sounds like it might be fucking awful. Why don't you get some gonzo to do this with you - for God's sake, why not James Hewlett?"

"He's in L.A.," Damon admitted.

Dave made a face. "So I'm the last one you asked, aren't I?" he grumbled. "Oh well. You knew I'd never do it. I wouldn't be locked up in a house with you freaking out on drugs all weekend, especially not without girls. Sorry." Dave made another face, this one much redder. "God, Dames, I'm really sorry. I mean... you'll get through it."

"Don't leave me alone on this, Dave," Damon pleaded. The tears started up again, big and tickly, and poured hot over his face. "Oh God... oh God, what am I going to do?"

"You're going to restart your life," said Dave seriously. He hesitantly put his hand on Damon's shoulder and squeezed it. "C'mon, you'll be all right."

"So it's alone then... I'll sort it out on me own..." Damon abruptly jumped up from his chair, shaking Dave's hand off his shoulder. He wiped his face with both hands, and put on his sunniest smile. Dave flinched. "Let's have dinner!" he bellowed.

 


	3. I've found nowhere

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damon takes a trip out to Sussex and, between remembering all the awful things he's gotten wrong in his life, his alienation, and his faithlessness, gets down to business with some hash cookies and 2-CB.

Early Friday morning, Damon packed for the weekend and set out on the two hours' drive to Balfe's house in Suffolk. He put Super Furry Animals on the car's CD player and braced himself to battle with the M1. Before he left, he had, for breakfast along with strong espresso, one of the hash biscuits he'd baked up last night, after Dave had eaten dinner, scolded him, and left. He hadn't really paid attention to what Dave had said after the salad course, retreating into a nice haze of stringing tunes together and not listening. He felt sorry for the people who couldn't do that - how did they get through their lives? He'd be stoned by the time he arrived. Perfect. He thought again of the despair he'd felt, looking at Dave's back, then Dave's tentative little wave and smile, and then the sound of the door closing. He would forever hate that sound.

"How could he prefer airplane lessons to this?" he asked himself.

Damon cranked the stereo and sang along at the top of his lungs, vaguely entertaining the idea of turning on his portable DAT recorder and taping it, then releasing it to the fan club? Oh, yes, licensing. He slammed his fists into the steering wheel. "God! Show me magic!" he screamed along with the song, not even bothering to follow the tune.

He hadn't called Suzi to tell her he was going. She didn't own him yet. He just didn't want to involve her in this, she'd be terribly worried, et cetera, et cetera. Unlike Justine, she didn't mind him getting high once in a while, but... Maybe it was better he didn't come back at all. He thought of aiming the car at the sky and driving away into it, leaving the planet, going to Mars or Heaven or whatever was up there, far enough away that he didn't hurt anyone anymore. He drove carefully, not wishing to be stopped by police for any reason - his goal and his cargo were too important.

He sneered at the traffic on the M1, all of it going into London. millions of people driving to work, trapped in foul shaky trains on their way to foul dull offices where they did the same mindless work for faceless corporations. _Thank God I escaped that,_ he thought. _Thank God I get to do what I like. These drones are on their way to a work day, strained with hope for the weekend, smiling because it's Friday, but working all the same, and I'm off to a posh country estate to blow my brains out.And I don't even have to wait for evening, I started before I left. My life is so much better than theirs. They get to go home tonight and there won't be photographers outside. The world makes sense to them._

Near Bridgewell, and by track seven, the biscuit slammed on. The landscape of roads and fields seemed to peel off a skin - molting, like a snake, revealing a new, shiny, more exact copy of the body underneath it, perfectly synched with the opening notes of "If You Don't Want Me To Destroy You." Gruff's honey-like voice sliced through Damon's body - punching him full of holes - and then filling him with the beautiful sound. It made him nostalgic for things that had never happened. It made him remember things that were so painful he'd managed to keep them blocked out of his mind.

_(Justine had come in very late after the phone call; for some reason she was surprised to find Damon still awake, playing piano aimlessly, smoking, staring out the window. She sat on the couch opposite him, still in her coat. She pushed her mop of untidy hair from her face and let out her breath in a long stream._

_"I'm leaving," she said, with her usual economy and candor._

_"Leaving?" Damon had said, still playing, even though he knew it was rude; he just couldn't stop himself. "In what way?" His voice was distant and neutral. God, God bless the Vicodin._

_"I'm moving out," she said. "I'm not going to play this game with you anymore, Damon. It's just worth it anymore. I've been putting it off for far too long, and now I'm going to do something about it."_

_"So you've basically managed to pencil me in just long enough to leave me," he said and laughed._

_"How can you possibly say that. My God. I can't believe..." She sounded so overwrought that Damon dared a glance over his shoulder, and saw her gripping a pillow so hard her knuckles had gone white. Quickly, he turned back round. "How could you say that? You wouldn't. The Damon I love would never say that. He would apologise. He would never have done it in the first place. He would have..." She stopped and swallowed so hard he could hear it over the gentle tinkling of the piano. "I don't even know you anymore. You're just not... Damon, the way I came to understand Damon. You've changed. And I'm not a part of it, except your past. It's got nothing to do with now. It's like I've been in love with a man who's dead, but occasionally comes back to life long enough to fuck me and tell me I'm wonderful before he goes back to the land of the dead. And that confusion... that's enough to drive me mad. I'm sure Damon Albarn's a nice person, it's just that I don't know who he is. Anyway. I came back to get some things. I won't be staying here again. I'll buy a flat in the morning, and start moving immediately." She stood up and marched to the bedroom._

_Damon tore himself from the piano bench and followed her. "Just like that, eh? Just like that? You're leaving? Like that's supposed to..." He couldn't finish his sentence. "Just. C'mon. We'll work it out in the morning."_

_"No, you'll work out in the morning," she snapped, lugging a huge overnight bag onto the bed. She began to toss clothes into it - unlike her, she being into having her clothes folded neatly. Her face was red. "No, I'm sorry, I won't fall for your emotional blackmail again. This is now not between us. This now involves others. You can throw me about, but you can't throw the mother of your child about, and I won't be a party to it." She stopped and pushed her hair back again, regarding him with a desperate glare. "I mean, do you love her?"_

_Damon blinked in disbelief. Emotional blackmail indeed! "Would it make you feel better if I said yes?" he asked._

_"I just want to hear the truth. For a change."_

_"That's not a fair question," he said. "I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't."_

_"That's right," Justine said with a smile. She went back to packing, a little more calmly now. "Answer me, Damon."_

_"Yes, I do love her," Damon said quietly. He had the terrible urge to tackle Justine and wrestle her to the bed, start covering her with kisses to see if she'd melt. She always melted. But he just stood there. He did feel like a stranger. He wondered if she'd changed as much as he had, but he didn't know, he didn't know her now, either._

_"Great," said Justine. She kept smiling. "I hope you'll be very happy together." A long silence fell, the rustling of the clothes in the bag as loud as shattering glass._

_"Look-look-look at the bright side," he said, stuttering in his attempt to lighten the mood at least somewhat. "You'll be the most famous cuckold since George Harrison."_

_"Yeah, but to do that, you'd have to be sleeping with Graham. Clapton was Harrison's best friend, that's the whole poignancy of it. That'd be funny if you left me for Graham." She actually laughed out loud. "I've been convinced he was in love with you from day one."_

_"_ You're _leaving_ me, _" Damon pointed out._

_Justine zipped up the bag and hoisted it over her shoulder. "Yes," she replied. "I am. Right now. Sleep tight, Damon."_

_He followed her to the front door. She paused for a moment and looked at him, using the back of her hand to brush the tears from his face. He hadn't even known he had been weeping. Without another word, she turned on her heel and left, closing the door firmly behind her. He vaguely heard, through his thick blanket of sobbing, her despairing scream at the top of her lungs.)_

He arrived at the Balfe's house and parked on a gravel drive. It wasn't the Very Big House in the Country that Damon had written about, but he liked this one much more. It was a big rambling Georgian farmhouse, added on to several different times in different eras without totally destroying the architecture. Damon remembered Graham's initial excitement looking at it, going mad about the architecture. He wished Graham was with him. He wondered if Graham really was in love with him. For a moment he hoped so, then remembered that loving him was the kiss of death to anyone. He wondered if that was why Graham drank, if that was why Graham looked at him so distantly now that he was sober. Because even Graham didn't love him anymore.

He got his things out of the car, unlocked the front door of the house, and breathed deep of the smell of an unfamiliar house. "We're all strangers here," he said out loud, hearing the echoes ricochet around. How nice not to be in the flat, how nice not to be in London.

He took a moment to refamiliarise himself with the house. Toilets, guest rooms, kitchen. On the kitchen table was a note from Balfe.

 

_Ahoy Damon! Eat, drink, and ingest whatever you like, as_  
_long as you're sick in designated areas only. The pool should be_  
_ready to use. If you need to reach me, ring my mobile. Sorry about the_  
_whole Justine mess, but things'll sort themselves out. Remember,_  
_you're immortal! -Dave._

Damon decided not to just sit down at the kitchen table and cry some more. He wanted to do something physical to take his mind off things. He grabbed the precious briefcase and put it on the kitchen table, unfastened the locks, and looked inside it.

Fifteen hundred micrograms of LSD, cleverly disguised as a strong vodka and orange, inside a shiny silver thermos bottle. Five capsules of E. A glassine baggie of amphetamine tablets. An eight-ball of brain-scrapingly pure cocaine. Five capsules of some odd designer drug with a name made up of numbers and letters that Damon couldn't remember. The remaining four grams of hashish that Damon hadn't made into biscuits, and the biscuits themselves, wrapped in shiny gold gift paper he'd found in the kitchen left over from Christmas. Ten Vicodin, half of what he had left. Twenty Valium tablets. One gram of half-strength heroin.

_("I need drugs," Damon had said to the dealer on the phone._

_"What do you want?" replied the dealer._

_"Everything you've got," Damon said. "Whatever you can get. I'll buy it. It's for the weekend.")_

And this is what he got. Not bad, for a thousand quid. A bargain, really. The designer psychedelics alone were worth over a hundred pounds. Damon always wondered what went through the minds of dealers when they sold hard drugs to people who were clearly on the edge. They thought of the money, he supposed.

 _When was the last time you did hallucinogens alone,_ _Damon?_ he thought.

He decided to take the designer drugs and play some basketball.

That was another reason why he wanted Graham to come (or better yet, Alex, because of his height), so he could practise his one-on-one so that he wouldn't look like such a wanker on the court next time he was in New York with the hip-hop crew. Last game he'd played, they wiped the pavement with him, mocked him openly, laughed at him. He remembered the gleam of white teeth in six different colours of brown faces, strong black hands extended to help him up off the ground where he'd taken a spill diving for an errant foul ball. He had brushed himself off and good-naturedly told them that he'd match them in football any time they wanted, but still, it had stung. He hadn't been bad at a sport in forever. He hadn't been bad at anything in forever.

He dragged his ball and a boom box out to the courtyard, then realised there was no hoop. He stood there dismayed for a few moments, then told himself, _You're tripping._ Imagine _there's a hoop. Shoot for it._

He bounced the ball against the side of the house a few times, jumping up to catch it when it returned, ducked and faked himself out. He settled into a nice rhythm of pushing the ball away from him, giving it a little spin, making a vector path. The vector path blurred into a solid orange triangle with a soundtrack - pish, boink, splat on the pavement, clap into his hands. He climbed into the orange triangle and made himself at home there.

And then he wasn't at home in it anymore. He was in the spaces between the sounds - caught for an eternity between the boink against the wall and the clap against his hands, which he kept waiting for, but it never came. It never came. He was falling into the spaces between the atoms, falling into the space between the electrons and the nucleus, that immense yawning gulf, buffeted by random pulls and tugs in the gravitational field. He tried to relax and just settle - let gravity take him to the nucleus - but he just hung there.

A random jolt of pain in his back kicked him back out of the atomic void. The ball never returned - he heard it bounce and patter off into the distance, growing fainter and then stopping altogether. He turned onto his side and found moss growing in between the cobblestones of the courtyard.

 _You can never get out of reality... you're always going to be trapped in this state between being and nothingness, between learning and ignorance... in the empty space that takes up most of the entire world..._ He tugged at a leaf of errant bamboo grass and found that he couldn't pull it all the way up. He felt guilty for trying to kill this tiny, simple life form, cupped his hands around it, breathed on it to help it get better and to apologise. He wondered if he should apologise with words, but then realized that the bamboo wouldn't speak his language, and that perhaps it would be better to address it in Chinese. He spoke an apology, tenderly caressing the slightly torn leaf, then realised that he didn't know Chinese and he'd just spoken gibberish to this little plant that he'd already injured, insulting it. He'd just insulted the entire plant kingdom.

He shuddered. He was cold. He decided to go back inside.

Standing up was a challenge.

By the time he found his feet again, the sheer triumph of being able to get back onto his feet made him laugh and whoop. He glared down at the bamboo shoot. "You can't keep me down, you little shit," he said. He kicked at the grass, but missed it.

_Ah yes, now I remember. 2-CB. This is 2-CB. The drug I'm on is called 2-CB. Must remember 2-CB so that when the ambulance comes to take me away and section me in the madhouse for the rest of time, I can tell them which drug I'm on._

He went back into the house and sat on the carpet and curled up, arms around his knees, rocking. Everything was glittering and shiny, as if wet, as if the whole world was lubed up and ready to be violated. He didn't recognise anything. _Am I at home?_ he wondered. This is not home. _Why didn't I decide to take drugs at home, where I recognise things? The cat, the kitchen, the bed..._

The bed was gone. She'd taken the bed.

Damon bent his head into his knees and began to rock harder, trying to find some kind of comfort in the heart-pounding rush. He tried to breathe slowly to slow his mad heartbeat, but with each breath, his heart grew inside him until it filled his whole chest and his head and his groin. He curled tighter, trying to squeeze his heart down to a reasonable size, but it just kept growing and pounding, faster and faster.

_I'm going to die alone._


	4. The man who left himself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was changing, every millisecond becoming a new organism. The Damon that had fallen down was not the same one now currently on the floor trying to relax; the old Damon had ceased to exist. And the Damon who had sat down no longer existed, either. The revolutions got smaller and smaller and he wondered when he was just going to shed himself entirely out of existence. If he had ever existed at all. (He's got a head full of drugs, so many that he has lost track of which ones and how much. This is hardcore.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the previous chapter and overlapping into this one (and the next), our hero has taken an excessive dose of 2CB. It's not life-threatening, but it's also not a good idea. Don't do that. Basically, don't do anything described in this story at all. :)

Damon tried another position - stretching out onto his back, trying to relax his knotted stomach. For so long he hadn't been aware of his body, but now it filled his consciousness, became his consciousness.... the galloping heart, lungs gasping for air, roaring in his ears, pain in his right hip. He didn't remember the vertigo so he had only a vague sense of having fallen to the ground earlier. It had happened to another person and he only got the pain.

He was changing, every millisecond becoming a new organism. The Damon that had fallen down was not the same one now currently on the floor trying to relax; the old Damon had ceased to exist. And the Damon who had sat down no longer existed. The revolutions got smaller and smaller and he wondered when he was just going to shed himself entirely out of existence. If he had ever existed at all.

_I'm a figment of my own imagination._

As he lay, unable to make himself be completely still, he turned his head and gazed at the carpet. It was fantastic. It had the same glossy sheen that everything did, but he was able to make his vision zoom in so that he could see the little fibers, which were vibrating wildly. He remembered Alex explaining superstring theory to him - little loops of string, vibrating like crazy, that made up every single thing in the universe, even the Nothing - and he immediately understood it. He and Alex had been very drunk at the time and Damon hadn't really gotten anything he'd said, but now he recalled it clearly, every smoker's cough of Alex's as he desperately tried to explain the complex physics to the slack-jawed Damon, the trails of smoke leading from his gesturing hand. Damon could now see the smoke trails, replicated in the carpet fibers, which danced their way across the carpet surface without ever really moving.

He began to laugh. So much weight had been lifted off him, thinking about Alex and physics. Now he felt fine. He was in control of the drug, no longer the other way round. _This is nothing,_ he thought to himself; _I could handle ten times this much. I ought to do this with Jamie one of these days. That is, if Suzi'll let me. Wait, I can take some with Suzi; she'd like this. Anyone would like this._

He staggered gracelessly to his feet again, swaying like a baby deer. He was a teenager again. He was a kid. He was a baby. He didn't exist yet, he was just an afterthought, a consequence of a spasm of lust. He decided to go out and run around in the fields, imagining the exercise would do him good, clear his mind, and help to burn off some of the excess energy that made him want to keep whipping his head around so that the world became a single coloured solid, of a colour he couldn't describe, the colour of everything mixed together. He had get out into the grass where the colour would be one he could describe - it'd be green. All green. He'd surround himself with a perfect plastic green cube.

He put on a polar-fleece hoodie in case he got cold, and ran out the side door, going a way he'd hadn't seen that day, straight out into the remaining paddock that Balfe owned. The people who lived in his house had always raised thoroughbreds, or at least been tangentially involved with the owners of the larger farm as stablehands or grooms, and it had originally come with one hundred acres of paddock land. Balfe had managed to whittle it down to five, but still... five acres of clover! He decided to spot the tree farthest from his sight on the horizon, and run for it as fast as he could.

It was much farther than he'd first assumed, but the run went by really fast. He adored the sensation of running on grass. And the sun was out and shining brilliantly on everything. The tree was his goal! It was so great to have something concrete and simple to focus on! When he was almost up to the tree, he stopped abruptly in his tracks and stooped down, patting the tops of the unmown grass. "Nice nature," he joked with the world. "Good nature. I didn't mean to hurt the bamboo. I can't hurt bamboo, anyway. It's immortal. Nature is immortal. Yeah." The world went right on growing and decaying and changing, not terribly concerned with him. It didn't need him. The world did not need Damon Albarn. The world could give a toss about who he was sleeping with. He clenched his fists and sighed. 

He realised he was panting and hot - that it was a hot day, and he'd just been running at top speed wearing a polar-fleece hoodie at what looked a little bit like noon. He began to laugh hysterically at himself. "Congratulations!" he said. "You've just lost ten thousand brain cells!" Now that he was alone, it gave him comfort to talk to himself out loud, to hear a voice, even if it was just his own. Everyone thought he was barmy anyway, why not give in for a while? That's why he was here, after all. To stop fighting against going mad. It felt like all of his energy for the last year had been spent actively struggling against the onset of complete and total psychic breakdown. And now he'd just given up. "You win," he said to the madness, which, he supposed, was up in the sky somewhere.

He sat down on the sun and took off the hoodie, spreading it on the grass and then lying upon it. He was completely unable to get comfortable because he kept squirming so much. He was still hot, so he took off his shoes and T-shirt and lay on his back again, exposing his belly to the sun. He needed it, even though he'd had some sunbathing in California, it wasn't enough. His therapist had told him that he needed sunlight, as much of it as he could get. 

"I should move to Sweden," Damon said. "Or Alaska. And then when the season changes I'll fuck off to Tasmania. I'll be the most mentally healthy man who ever lived."

The grass was tall enough so that when he lay in it, it was taller than he was, so he sat up again for a moment and unzipped his jeans and stripped them off. He thought that naked he might be able to relax, and the sun felt marvelous burning down on him.

 _Oh!_ he thought. _I have a watch!_

A very good, very expensive watch, at that, thick and dull-sheened and authoritative, big enough to make his wrist look slim in comparison. He held his arm directly above his head, struggling to read what it said. There was no way he could tell. He stared at it for a very long time, watching numbers squiggle around and make faces at him. It was meaningless. He dropped his arm and squinted up at the sun. "It's daytime," he said. "That's all I need to know."

He had parallel thoughts - suddenly missing Suzi, wishing she was here, missing her cute little bunny face and her perpetually sad eyes and the soft hairs on her arms. He really wanted to cuddle with her, lying in the grass in the scorching sunlight. At the same time he marveled at how lucky he had been to get out of the house this morning without there being any press outside - photographers and nosy journalists with tape recorders had been camped outside of his flat for the last two weeks, since Justine had found out about the baby. She'd "been enlightened," as she called it, in a very public place, by some journo actually thrusting a paper under her nose backstage, at someone else's after-gig party, and asking her for her comments. "Usually I ignore that shit, but I caught it out the corner of my eye," Justine had said to him on the phone, her voice shaking, but quiet. The press lapped it up. They'd been wanting to skewer Damon for something for so long - the fire had gone out of the Oasis-Blur feud now that both parties had learned to keep their mouths shut about each other in public, and the press were bored and feeling vicious. Damon was horrified that anyone would actually care who he fucked, when thousands of women were being raped in Croatia every day. 

But this morning they'd been gone; he wondered what had happened. Maybe Liam Gallagher had smacked Patsy Kensit over breakfast and the journos had to go bother them. Maybe they couldn't be arsed to get up at six to see if Damon was still an early riser? Then again, Damon hadn't left the flat since he'd gone to to Alex's house, and there'd been two photogs then, who asked him where he was going, and all he'd said to them was "You don't have permission to publish those, so I don't know why you bother." They said something nasty behind his back. _What a drag, what a drag._

Damon thought about Liam smacking Patsy and his conflicting emotions (satisfaction, sadness, amusement, guilt) confused him so much he had to roll over and throw up.

He sat up and put his head between his hands. He felt claustrophobic. He felt shaky and cold. He looked around himself in a panic, wondering if they were waiting for him somewhere, photographers hidden in hedgerows, lying flat on the grass to stalk him like pythons with tape recorders and vicious questions. _Is it true that you're lovers with Graham Coxon? Or that you were, since he sobered up and doesn't fancy you anymore? Is it true that you gave Justine Frischman AIDS? Isn't it true that your careers are over, and if they aren't, they will be by next year? Where's your new album, Damon? Where's your talent, Damon? Where's your genius, Damon? Why are you sitting naked in a meadow off your tits on drugs, Damon?_

They care, but they don't care.

Damon couldn't bear to get dressed again. He crawled to the willow tree with his clothes clutched in his fists, and slumped against it. The branches drooped down all the way to the ground, providing a shimmery green curtain that he could hide behind. He put his back to the tree, and rested his head against it.

He drifted away into wordless amazement that his mind could create such infinite and terrible universes.

When he looked round again, the sun had coasted further down the sky - quite far, in fact, almost halfway to the horizon. Late afternoon. His heart had stopped pounding and now he felt perfectly fine physically, a little sunburned but not too severely. He was thirsty, though, and dying for a cigarette. He put his T-shirt and jeans back on, but left his shoes off. Time to go back to the house. He was coming down; the drugs were wearing off. "We can't let that happen," he said. "Time to smoke."

When he got back to the house, he filled his sports bottle with water, rolled a cigarette with hashish, and sat on the back patio to smoke and drink. He could now read his watch - it was 7 o'clock, later even than he'd thought. He wondered how long he'd been lying in the sun, or lost in his own kaleidoscope brain under the willow tree. Or lying on the carpet. 

The hash made him hungry, so he meandered to the kitchen. The only thing he could handle touching was bread, so he leaned against the sink slowly nibbling on a handy slice, watching the crumbs tumble into the sink and soak up drops of water at the bottom. He sucked distractedly at his water bottle, suddenly craving beer, and when he'd finished the bread, he began searching for some beer in the kitchen.

There wasn't any. Dave Balfe had no beer. Dave Balfe had known that Damon was coming for the weekend, and the kitchen was fairly well stocked with food and wine and hard liquor, but there was no beer, and Damon just couldn't figure it out. He felt that he would go mad if he didn't have a pint of beer. There was no way around it - he was going to have to go into town. 


	5. what was not will never will be

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damon Albarn is an Englishman, thus instinct sends him to a pub to get a pint of bitter. Unfortunately for him, he is Damon Albarn, massive national celebrity, rather fit, agonizingly emotionally sensitive, and high as balls...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loves to ride a bike, does our Damon. This chapter was inspired by a very specific photograph from about 1997, which I now can't find. Dear internet, you've failed me. Oh well, that's life, innit... (Fortunately I saved the picture when I could, so I've got a copy, but sadly can't share it here.)
> 
> Wicken is of course a real town. I've never been there, but I saw a lot of little Suffolk towns motoring through with my brother between Ipswich, Newmarket, and Cambridge - enough to know what they're like. A piece of my heart lives there, and when I'm not there, I keenly feel its loss. It's been 17 years. I'm not going to get over it.

It was two miles to Wicken, the nearest town. One hour's walk. He briefly considered driving, but when he tried to go to the table for his keys, he tripped over his untied shoelaces and went sprawling. He lay on the floor for a moment, giggling. Driving was out then....

He firmly tied the laces on his trainers (horribly grass-stained by this point) and went outside. In the garage next to Balfe's car were two bicycles. They were locked up, though, so he had to go back inside to find the key to that. He skinned up another hashish cigarette while he was at it. He rooted around in kitchen drawers with the cig hanging unlit from his mouth, silently cursing the Middle of Nowhere, hoping he didn't have to hunt around a strange town all night to find a pub.

Once he was on the bike, he felt substantially better. He pedaled on and lit the cigarette and enjoyed the evening. He was aware enough to have put his hoodie back on, and he was glad for it - though the day was still warm, the breeze from biking stripped most of the warmth from the air. He rode past hedgerows and empty paddocks and tiny streams, and when the little gravel drive became a real road, a car here and there. And then some small houses and business buildings. He realised that this was the entirety of Wicken, and he stopped his bike and looked down the road, and he was quite certain that he could see the end of town from the beginning of it.

He kept on down the road until he found the inevitable pub, and he locked the bike against a fence and went inside. He almost lost his nerve before he crossed the threshold - the first cigarette's effects had been more than doubled by the second, and he was stoned as hell. He tried to smooth out the impending panic attack, reminding himself that all he needed to do was ask for a pint, sit down, and drink it, and try to stay out of trouble. In a town this small, he wasn't in any danger.

While he stood there reasoning with himself, a stocky older fellow opened the door and bumped into him on the way out. "Pardon me!" Damon said reflexively, blushing hard, and hurried inside.

It had been a long time since Damon had been in a small town pub; he was vaguely startled by the size of their television, but realised it must be where all the sport was watched. On the TV, Leeds was playing Tottenham. Damon noted the score - naught all - and went up to the bar. The barmaid was young and very pretty with red hair in Spice Girls bunches and a tight T-shirt with cheesy kittens embroidered on it. He almost wanted to laugh at her, then remembered his task. _Get in, get a pint, get out and go back home._ "A pint of bitter please," he muttered to her, eyeing the TV again.

She looked over her shoulder at him. "Eh? A glass?"

He spoke up. Or spoke at all. Not sure. "Er, a pint. Please."

She blinked one eye at him. He felt the flush of recognition, and felt himself beginning to blush again. He half-smiled at her. "What are _you_ doing here?" she asked.

"Having a drink." _Must. Not. Panic._

A young man approached the bar, tapping down his empty glass. The bar girl immediately began pulling a new one for him. He leaned against the bar, following Damon's gaze up at the TV. "All right, Damon?" he asked, like he was an old friend.

Damon tried to relax. "Yeah," he replied. "Cheers." He felt like leaping across the bar and sticking his face under the tap.

The young guy looked over the barmaid's shoulder at the wall, then back at Damon, and smirked. Damon looked at the wall too, and saw the row of Oasis pin-ups half-hidden by bottles. Damon looked back at the young guy and shrugged. "Am I supposed to care?" he asked innocently.

"Just thought you might."

Damon got his pint and took a big swallow. How wonderful - finally soothing that craving. He straightened out his shoulders and raised his head. "If I'd known this was a whites-only drinking fountain, I might have dressed better," came slipping out of his mouth. He immediately regretted it. He was acting like Graham. _For God's sake, be nice. You might be a member of the Newly Mad Class, but you oughtn't to get a kicking for no reason._

To his pleasure, the young guy broke into a grin. "Nah, nah, 's not like that." He slid a fiver onto the bar. "I've got this one."

"Cheers," Damon smiled back.

"I'm Ed," said the young guy. "Join us, would you?"

Damon bought the next round of lagers for Ed and his mates - Fiona, Sam, and Jeff. Fiona was down from Cambridge for the weekend, and the others all worked at the Wicken Fen nature reserve. He was quiet and let them talk, happy to be in the midst of a conversation that wasn't about him. The happiness melted away when Fiona turned to him with vague stars shining in her eyes, and asked him, "So what in the world are you doing in Wicken?"

"I'm... I'm just getting a beer," he mumbled.

"So, what, you come up here from London just to get a beer? Here?" Fiona was chubby and blonde and had many earrings, her eyes a little hollowed out from hours of study. "I mean, c'mon."

"No, really, I'm just on a bike ride, and I fancied a pint," Damon said. The others at the table stared at him with interest - they wanted entertainment. All Damon wanted was another pint, since the first two had been so good. "Another of the same?"

It wasn't too hard to distract them - Jeff, Ed and Fiona were all friends with a long shared past and a week full of dramatic occurrences that needed to be aired out, and Damon really wasn't saying anything, but he was buying them rounds. Several of them. Fiona was falling prey to his charms, even though his charms weren't much more than sitting there with an idiotic smile on his face and occasionally jumping up to go to the bar to get more drinks. To escape the mounting tension between them, and to fulfill a different pressing need, he excused himself to go to the toilet.

He was in mid-piss when Sam came in and leaned against the door. Damon finished up as fast as he could, and washed his hands. His hands were still dripping wet when Sam butted him in the face.

"You stay off Fiona," Sam snapped.

Damon clapped his hands to his suddenly bloody and throbbing nose. "I don't _want_ Fiona!" he sputtered.

"Course you do, she's gorgeous. And I know your type, Albarn - you couldn't keep it in your keks if you tried." He tried to take a swing, but Damon blocked, and countered it with a fist to the midsection. Sam doubled over and sicked up his last few rounds of lager. It completely saturated Damon's trainers and the bottoms of his jeans.

"You daft fuck!" Damon yelled. "I don't want your fat nerdy girlfriend, OK? Look what you've done to my Adidas." As he turned to flee the toilet, he slipped in the vomit and went sprawling again. Sam took advantage of this to give Damon the kicking he had hoped he wouldn't get.

Ed and the pub owner came barrelling into the toilet and separated them. Both were bloody and covered with slimy sick. "You don't have to ask me to leave," Damon said, "I'm going, I'm going." The barmaid had a little smile on her face as he went out the door.

Ed followed Damon out to the locked bike, looking ashamed and very drunk. "Gor, I'm sorry about that," he said. "I didn't figure that would happen. Sam's usually so chill, y'know? He and Fiona just started going out a little while ago. He never had a girlfriend the rest of the time I knew him, so I had no idea he was the psychotically jealous type. Fuckin' Oasis fans."

"Yeah, well, I have a talent for bringing out the psychotically jealous side of people," Damon said, fumbling with the bike lock with his slippery, shaking hands. He hadn't gotten sick, but he now wished that he had; the alcohol was swamping his bloodstream and making everything spin round. "It's not your fault. Thanks for being kind."

"You gonna be all right?"

"Yeah, it's just a little ways, mostly downhill..."

"Oh, you're staying at Dave Balfe's house."

Damon abruptly sobered up. "How did you know that?"

"Cos he sometimes comes into the pub when I'm there. I'm always there, so I stand a pretty good chance of running into him. He's a nice guy. A little tightly wound. But nice, eh?"

Damon finally managed to get the bike unlocked. "Do us a favour and keep it under your hat," he said, struggling to get the bike away from the fence. Everything was so difficult; he felt like gravity had subtly increased, and now even the air was as thick as pudding. He was desperate to get back and shower. "Please," he insisted, "I need the privacy right now, know what I mean? It's been a shit couple of weeks and I needed to get away. I just wanted to get away from all the unpleasantness, and all the thoughts I've been having. I needed to be on me own for a while. Look, I just..." Damon stopped and sighed. "I'm babbling. I'm very stressed out right now. Remind your friend Sam of his behaviour when he sobers up, and if he's not really fucking sorry, he's not a decent person and you shouldn't be his friend anymore."

"Damon, really, I'm sorry."

"You're not the one who needs to be sorry; it's _me_ ," he snapped, and rode away into the dark distance.

He got lost on the way back. There were no lights after a half mile or so, and all the landscape looked the same in the dark. He wished he'd brought his great new Maglight torch with him, but he didn't know it would be so dark, or that he'd be so fucked up. He got off the bike and sat down for a moment by the roadside, desperately willing himself to either sober up, or remember the way. _For God's sake, Albarn, sort it out. The main road in Wicken turns into the A1123, and then it's a left at Westside Farm... or a right... Christ, which was it?_

A car passed him going far too fast for a dark country road. Reluctantly, he dragged himself back onto the bike and started back the way he'd come. He was freezing cold now, and the smell rising off his clothes made him want to puke. _If I make it back to the house, I'm not leaving again this weekend. Stupid beer._

It was a right at the farm. He saw the vaguely familiar hedgerows, and kept on the bike along the stream until he recognised where he was. He let out a long happy scream as he crunched and bounced down the gravel drive and saw his own car sitting there in front of the garage.

He put the bike away, then went inside, wondering if he should put his car in now or let it wait until he'd had a shower. He decided to let it wait, since he didn't want his nice new car smelling like sick instead of the pleasant waft of petrochemicals it now had. The coast was still clear, and the second, unlocked bike was intact. He figured it would be safe. For now, he had to get himself cleaned up.

He tossed his filthy clothes into the washer in the pantry, frowned at his ruined shoes. He swallowed three Vicodin. He eyed the thermos bottle full of acid cocktail, but felt that it could wait until the painkillers had taken effect. He stroked the sleek surface of the bottle with his stained fingers, feeling disjointed. It seemed like days since he'd been tripping out in the glorious sunshine.

He stood under the shower for a good long time, scrubbing himself, gingerly touching his bruised face, his bruised hip, his bruised ribs... His hands were a wreck. He wondered how much damage he'd done Sam; it might have been a lot, since Sam was awfully bloody when he looked at him the last time. Damon often forgot how strong he was. He hoped to God it wasn't bad, that all the blood was his own, since he didn't need a lawsuit on top of everything else.

He flipped the shower lever and put a stopper in the plughole, turning up the water temperature. He needed, wanted, required a hot bath.

In the tub, he thought again of Suzi, missing her, and tried to have a wank, but her face and body kept getting all mixed up with Justine's, and oddly enough, Fiona's, though he'd never touched her. Just sitting next to her, knowing that she wanted him, had made him all too aware of her physically, and he wondered what she was like in bed. Then he thought of Suzi's pregnant belly, showing quite a lot last he'd seen her, when he'd gone with her to the obstetrician for her checkup, and how he hadn't even noticed the photographer, snapping a photo without a flash. There was no way he could masturbate with that in his head, so he gave up and sighed, trying to dissolve himself in the water.

The Vicodin helped.

Damon lay, half drifting off to sleep, until the water had gone cold. He got out, annoyed with himself. He didn't want to waste time on sleep. He put on his spare pair of worn jeans and a sweatshirt, and headed back to the kitchen, holding onto the walls to keep himself steady. The effects of the Vicodin were very strong for some reason, much stronger than he had expected, and he had a hard time seeing clearly in the mostly dark house. He managed to find his way back to the kitchen, where he drained the thermos, sucking down twenty hits of LSD with a vague shudder of his head. He couldn't taste it, of course. It tasted like watered-down vodka and orange. He wished he didn't have to drink any more... "Oh, yeah, that's why the Vicodin's so strong," he said aloud. He was appalled at the way his voice sounded - dry and stretched, like an old elastic ready to break.

He went into the drawing room, put the new Tortoise on the stereo, and sat down at the piano. Thank God Balfe was a keyboardist as well, and he had plenty of instruments. He began to play along with the music which meandered along, slowly gaining in intensity, but never reaching above a certain restrained level. There were just so many instruments on this album. He picked a melodic line of piano being tapped out in a soothing, repeating rhythm, breathing slowly, waiting for the rush to come.

And then it came. And it was much.

Much.

Much too strong.

His eyes shot open so quickly he felt his eyelids roll up inside his skull like window shades, his brain growing three sizes too large in an instant. Panic was the only response that made sense...


	6. the misery of a speeding heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "No one is meant to take this much acid..." Unfortunately, Damon has, and he descends into a spiral of confrontation with his own past mistakes – with drugs and women both (sometimes, in fact often, at the same time). Teletubbies and Tortoise and "The Debt Collector."

A ton of bricks, an atom bomb, a crucifixion

_Oh my God so much acid I don't think I was meant to take this much acid NO ONE is meant to take this much acid I've taken a permanent insanity dose_

He snapped to, reality informing him he was running like mad on the gravel path outside the house. As soon as he became aware of this - dashing like a panicked animal - he fell straight over onto his face.

The pain sparkled through him like a billion fireworks, like a game show in Purgatory.

 _Millions now living will never die and you're one of them, Damon Albarn, today is your unlucky day, YOU'VE been chosen of every consciousness that has ever existed to feel this way, right here, right now!_ He closed his mouth, accidentally clenching his teeth down on a stray bit of driveway gravel. It shattered every bone in his body. _You will never find peace in this life because this endless torment will continue for the rest of time! [applause from the studio audience] And best of all, you did it to yourself! You have no one to blame but yourself!_ You _took that acid!_ You _took this weekend!_ You _fucked around! YOU ALONE!_

He spit, then spit again, then began to puke in what felt like a slow rolling tidal wave shuddering up from his legs to his stomach, throat, mouth. The acidic tang of the orange juice tore up his nose and sinuses, and more gravel worked its way into his shirt and jeans as he scrambled backward, trying to distance himself from that unpleasant, steaming puddle of reality. He had gotten quite far from the house, but he crawled backward on his belly the whole way until he felt the concrete step against his foot. He stood up and had a moment of sudden, violent clarity.

_Well, that's fifty quid down the drain. Out my mouth ... and ugh... out my nose._

In the two seconds that it took him to cross the threshold back into the house, he realised that it wasn't the whole fifty quid wasted; he could still feel the ceiling crushing down on his head and the floor melting and sliding away, as if he stood in a river made of wood. The walls were made of blue-and-black Spanish lace. Tortoise played on, the earnest notes like tiny ropes pulling him in. He slumped next to the piano bench on the floor, close to the stereo speaker subwoofer, settling into the low bass tones.

Only for a second, though.The music was so shiny and twinkly and sincere – that fucking vibraphone! – that he had to get away before he ripped out his own eyes. Then he was on his feet again and rushing about the house. He took off all his clothes and tried to shake the gravel from them, but there was always more gravel where the first gravel came from, and tiny pebbles fell out and ran around his ankles, little miniature Roman chariots with little miniature Romans in flashing battle gear, racing around his bare, wet feet.

_Wet...? It's not wet outside..._

Damon lifted his head and looked down the hall to the front room. A trail of sparkling footprints marked his passage. He lifted one foot and looked at the sole, expecting to see a clear film of expelled vodka and orange and beer coating the bottom, but instead it was a blackish, crusty mess.

Damon hoisted himself up to the kitchen sink counter to wash his feet. He ran water from the tap into the sink and dipped his feet into it. He thought about Alex and his masseuse Momo, and what a gorgeously unwholesome concept that all was - reflexology massages done as house calls! Only Alex could find a way to have a pretty girl come to his house to wash and massage his feet; only Alex could find a way of getting her to massage other parts of him as well. How could Alex sleep with a woman he was paying? In his mind, Alex smiled at him and said, "I'm paying her for the massage. She gets _me_ as a tip." Damon shuddered all over. He felt angry and sensual and he never wanted to see Alex again, while at the same time wishing Alex was with him now. Alex was a sublime drug companion. He looked at the bottoms of his feet to make sure they were clean, and they were very pink and quite clean and had a texture somewhat like a terrycloth towel. As he stared in wonderment, the little fronds of colourless skin slowly turned red.

_Oh, shit, I've just tracked blood all over Dave Balfe's house. But I can't get down from here to stop the bleeding without making more tracks..._

Damon remained on the sink, running more water over his feet. It felt good. He wanted another bath, but the memory of the claustrophobia of the bathtub repelled him. The water soaked directly into his bloodstream, and he closed his eyes and saw cool rushing blue computer-generated bubbles like a mouthwash advert. He turned off the tap most of the way, and flicked at the falling drops with his fingernail. Such a perfect beat.

He got bored and embarrassed again. "Tripping freak," he cursed himself. His voice sounded like the croak of a dying old dragon, wedged into his cave on top of ten tons of gold doubloons. He grabbed a kitchen towel from a loop next to the sink and dried his feet, then dropped the towel onto the floor and prepared to step down onto it.

It was so _far_. Miles and miles away, and the floor wouldn't stay solid. Was it even the floor? Perhaps it was a wall, or the ceiling. Fear gripped his guts, and he curled up on the countertop, the edge of the sink digging into his bare behind. _How did I get all the way up here?_ he wondered. _I'm like a cat up a tree. Call the volunteer fire brigade to come and get me down._

He crooned, “Someone please help get me do-o-o-own..."

_Help yourself, Damon._

He took a huge breath and slid one leg down off the counter, searching for the towel with his toe. The towel was right there at leg's length, slightly damp and soft-spiky. Once one foot was down, the other was easy. He sighed with relief to have both feet on solid ground again. Now he had to go to the toilet. On the way there, he grabbed yet more clean clothes. Now he was in track pants - his absolute last resort - and a polo shirt. His feet had stopped bleeding, and now he couldn't tell that they ever had been. He could barely make out the bloody footprints that had, a moment ago, seemed vast and deep; bloodstain lakes. He swiped at the faint marks with his foot on the towel.

Damon decided that he should watch some television - exhaustion gnawed him through the adrenaline of the acid trip, and he knew that if he could feel it even through _that_ , he ought to relax and save his energy. There was no way for him to know how much he'd actually kept down his stomach, but it was about as powerful as the most he'd ever had in the past, which had been six ordinary doses. The hashish and the Vicodin demanded that he sit down, preferably someplace soft, and focus on something outside his own head for a while, since there was no way he was going to get to sleep any time that night.

He settled himself in the television room upon the sofa and hunted for the remote control.

Teletubbies turned into spinning and morphing fractals. A soap opera, starring himself as the leader of a community orchestra where no one knew how to play their instruments properly, and when he jumped down impatiently to take up an instrument to show them how to do it, it kept changing in his hands - strings turned to keys turned to bells turned into odd misshapen brass, and then swirled around his arms and fingers and began to constrict around his throat like a boa. He changed back to Teletubbies, but Teletubbies became a freaky monster movie full of gory innards and bits of neon-coloured fluff. _Oh my God, they killed Tinky Winky! You bastards!_ There was so much darkness and lightning on the screen that he had to close his eyes, but the visions inside his eyelids were so violent and extreme that he opened his eyes again and focused on the green LED display on the VCR. It flashed 12:00, 12:00 at him. _It's midnight and nobody around here knows how to set a VCR clock. It's midnight. Midnight forever._

So dark outside. So dark inside.

***

Had he fallen asleep? But that was impossible... he was never able to sleep on acid. Damon sat up. He hadn't fallen asleep because the VCR still read 12:00. And the walls still breathed and crawled.

He went back to the silent drawing room and sat at the piano again. He gently prodded a white key, and it made no sound, so he tapped more firmly on a black key. The single note - A# - vibrated everything around him, tinting everything with a soft grey-purple colour. He tried again with the A major (bright green and wavy), and then, with authority, middle C. Middle C, so straight and normal, so profoundly beautiful. Everything was ordinary, only much more clear, perfect versions of themselves.

_I'm peaking._

The LSD was now at its strongest. If this was like the six tabs he'd done before, he'd be peaking for the next six hours. But how could he measure six hours?

He held out his wrist to check his watch, and found that it was gone. _Bugger, I've lost another one... well, fuck it twice, because I'll buy a new one on Monday, and there's no such thing as time here. It's nighttime, and that's all I need to know._ He stretched his fingers and gazed at them - surreal skinny skeleton, they were nothing but bones and skin and flesh and veins, cells dividing, buzzing, living. He was alive. He was still alive. Still.

He thought to himself as he lay his fingers on the keys, _If I time this right, I can candyflip pretty soon. Throw a few E's on top of this, make it all into funtime._

He played "The Debt Collector", countless times... maybe ten, maybe more. His left hand could play the bass melody forever if left to its own devices, while his right hand tripped through the every overlying melody his brain could manage. Lots of them were very strange, jazzy, atonal things, and some were utter simplicity. He looked round him for a pencil and paper to make notations of some of the new variations, and couldn't find one anywhere near him, so he just kept playing.

Damon got a devastating cramp in his leg where it had been all tense against the leg of the bench, and he stood up to try to work it out... since he was up, he went to the front door. Which was still open. And his car was still in the drive. He wondered where his car keys were, and stood on the threshold, scratching his head. He didn't remember why he was there, and not at home in London.

He went back inside, and softly closed and locked the door behind him.

***

_She was an intern at Food Records. She had been there for a few months - Damon recognised her from the last time he'd been in the offices. She had a great sense of style without looking like she cared too much about it. He'd said hello to her on his way in to the meeting, where he was going to reassure them yet again that he wasn't breaking up Blur, as if it was his decision alone to make. To talk about big gigs and money and plans. He soaked up her sly smile like a thirsty man with a thimbleful of water._

_Liss. She had an odd name that easily slipped his mind when he wasn't looking right at her._

_"No, you don't understand - I'm working on film music right now, but... there'll be time. You know us. We get in the studio and a record comes out. We know how it's done by now." Damon steepled his fingers in front of him on the table, wishing he'd worn nicer clothes to the meeting. He felt like a scruff in a Chelsea jersey and jeans, and here were the Food chaps in suits._

_"You go into the studio, and then a year goes by, and then a record comes out," pointed out an executive. "If we're lucky."_

_Damon shot out his breath in a stream, unsure of how to answer that without getting nasty, at the same moment as his mobile went off. He glanced at his jacket pocket, a little horrified that he'd forgotten to turn it off, but decided not to show it, decided that maybe he should practise intimidation, and make them think that he held the cards. Because he did. Without the songs that he wrote and his band played, they wouldn't have Italian suits and country homes. He answered it without checking the incoming number. "Yeah?"_

_"Darling, it's Justine. I hope not interrupting anything."_

_"Meeting."_

_"Oh - right - I forgot. Sorry." She let out a tiny, embarrassed laugh. "Just calling to say don't wait up for me tonight, I'm going to be pulling a late one down in the studio. I'm having serious problems and serious ideas at the same time. And... other people aren't quite seeing it my way." If she said it like that, that meant that those people were probably within earshot and at the ends of their tethers; to a point, Justine did exercise tact, especially in the studio._

_"Just machine-gun them," Damon suggested. "Finish it by yourself."_

_"I'm sorry - I know we meant to spend tonight together, but... you know how it's like. I'll see you later. OK?"_

_"Yeah. See you." Damon put his phone away, completely expressionless._

_Dave Balfe smirked at Damon. "How_ is _Justine?"_

_The bastard._

_Damon left the meeting first, desperate for a breath of fresh air. Liss was getting her coat out of the closet. "All right Damon?" she asked. "You busy?"_

_"Not too busy to have a drink with you."_

_It just came out of his mouth. Sometimes it was like that. He said things he didn't even have in mind, especially around girls. It wasn't a deliberate kind of sluttishness, that constant effort to be smooth and pull the birds. He just said patently idiotic things and didn't know where they came from. Verbal diarrhea, Graham called it. "You've got a leaky arsehole, but it's your face." Graham, the eternal charmer._

_They went to the private club where Damon was a member. He always felt like James Bond when he went into these places, and it made him a little giddy. He would never be caught alone with a woman someplace incredibly hip. He was always left alone at his club, and nothing he'd ever done there had gotten any press. He bought her dinner, shaking off her vehement protests that she would pay him back for it. "I'm expensing it, anyway," he said, and wasn't sure if he was joking. (He did end up expensing it, because the label meeting had annoyed him. It was all the same money.) He liked her, and the meeting had left him with a craving for reckless decadence. Liss was in training to become a record executive herself, and in the mean time acted as a talent scout, office assistant, and "general fetcher of tea and things," as she said. She was twenty and looked an exciting, relaxed twenty-five, like she'd already sorted out her awkward early twenties and was ready to settle into the way life ought to be lived._

_At some point in the evening, sometime after the discussion of books, absinthe, and which pills were fun to mix, she put her head to one side and said, "Ever had heroin?"_

_Damon was startled and looked around him. No one was paying any attention to them. He leaned in close to her. "No," he said with a slight smile._

_"That surprises me." Her voice, full of cigarette smoke, was low and cool._

_Damon gave a little shrug. "I just don't know why I'd want to do it." He had a feeling that the gleam in his eye had already given him away._

_"It's all right," she laughed, looking past his shoulder, and then directly into his eyes. "It's not the end of the world, you know. It's just really nice. The reason why I'm saying this is that I have some. And it's too much for me to want to do all by myself, but it's just right for two lightweights. I haven't had any for... six, eight months. I've forgotten. It's really good, and I won't see it again for years, if ever. 'S sort of nostalgic. Besides, I want you to come over to mine."_

_"Fair enough," Damon said. He drained his drink and stood up._

_Small, dark, pin-neat flat. One string of pale yellow fairy lights by the window. "I won't do needles," Liss said, sprawling on the bed, kicking off her shoes. "I wouldn't do that to you, anyway. We'll smoke it. It's more wasteful, but I don't care to save some for tomorrow. Tonight will be it." He inhaled smoke off tinfoil. She did the same. They sat back on her bed and waited. They didn't have to wait long. Damon felt everything that had ever bothered him being expelled in one huge sigh from the bottom of his soul. He had never been so content in his whole life. He didn't even mind when Liss grabbed his left hand and slid it between her bare legs. He kissed her back because it pleased him to do it. He put his fingers inside her and brought her to whimpering orgasm because it pleased him to do so, not because he felt obligated, or that he wanted to impress her or make her happy. He refused to fuck her, though. She wouldn't leave him alone, though, and she ended up going down on him, and his orgasm was delicious and cascading and almost changed his mind about the sex. But he said out loud, "I can't stay here, I have to meet Justine." And Liss was all right with that and kissed him goodbye on her doorstep._

_"Justine?" Later, on his side, in his own bed. Damon had ridden her so hard she begged for him to stop, then changed her mind. No way for her to tell that part of his staying power was due to having already climaxed that night, at least once (he didn't really remember). "Have you ever done heroin?"_

_Justine's face was lovely, as slack as his own, in the purple-grey dawn light. "Yeah," she said, a little reluctantly. "Before I met you."_

_"What did you think of it?"_

_She shook her head fractionally, then sighed and giggled as he nibbled and kissed her ear. "It made me ill," she said. "I mean, it was very nice. It's heroin. But ... y'know. I don't like being sick." She tried to look at him without turning her head. "Why?"_

_"I just had some earlier," he said._

_Justine raised herself on her elbows and frowned down at him. "I work really late, and so you stay out all night taking heroin?" she demanded. "What were you thinking?"_

_Damon shrugged innocently. "I was curious," he said, blinking and gazing at her with total adoration. "It was nice."_

_"You're so stupid." Her glare turned into a slight smile, and she traced her finger along the line at the corner of his mouth. The melt. He saw it every morning they slept together. That was his true addiction. "Just promise me you won't do it again, please," she stated firmly. "You aren't famous for your self-control."_

***

He couldn't remember what he said then. He said whatever would get her back into his arms the fastest, get her to cuddle against his chest and fall asleep and join him in dreaming. He remembered that it didn't take much convincing, and he knew that he had managed to transfer quite a bit of the drug into her body just by making love to her. Maybe she was just so ecstatically satisfied that she accepted that line of bullshit. Or maybe she just wanted to hold him and go to sleep.

There was so much that they didn't know about each other. Would never know.

God, what he wouldn’t give to feel better.

Damon, slicing through sheets of brittle, translucent psychedelic gravity layers, hung up the phone, got up off the couch and went to the kitchen for the Ecstasy.

…


	7. sand to polished stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damon gets to the MDMA in his collection, and slips into a fugue of memories that transports him to the breaking point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [excerpt from original note written at the time] A hell of a long nasty bastard of a chapter, moving into seriously naughty, strange, tripped out territory. 
> 
> [new note] One of the most common misconceptions about "Ecstasy" is that it makes the user euphorically happy - ecstatic, in other words. This is not exactly accurate - it actually intensifies an ordinary emotion by a factor of, oh, I'd say, 10,000. Not good news for our hero.

Damon's hands shook so badly as he handled the Ecstasy capsules that, one by one, they shattered and crumbled in his fingers. Yellowish powder spilled across the kitchen table and wafted in butterfly sheets through the air. He blinked at the mess for a few seconds, forgetting its significance, lost only in the messages and glyphs formed by the random spillage of yellow drug dust.

He stretched forward to the table, smoothed as much of the dust as he could into a sloppy semblance of a line, and bent his nose into it.

_Up you go, dear._

Most of it shot and floated away, startled by his breath, and a lot of it just coated the skin of his nose, but both nostrils managed to hoover up some of the drug. He sniffed it back hard. At once the pain hit him, like a kick to the face, as well as the gritty sensation of the powder clinging to the sweat on his nose. He cursed wordlessly and staggered to the sink, beginning to splash water over his face. He skidded sideways on the towel which lay damp on the floor.

When he straightened up, he could see out the kitchen window to the garden outside, where a bamboo grove both shielded and threatened the house, and he could see the knife-edge silhouette of the leaves against a soft pearl grey sky. The sky was in A sharp. He'd seen it earlier, and now that he was seeing it, he could hear it. He opened his mouth and matched the tone with his voice. It gave him a jolt right at the base of his spine and suddenly his groin was burning, tingling, vibrantly alive. The pressure built until he had to arch his spine.

_Oh yeah. Oh my God yeah._

Damon dried his face on his sleeve, found his clean shoes (worn and threadbare Nikes), put on his polar fleece hoodie and his coat. He made sure his cigarettes were in his coat pocket and that he had his walkman with him, grabbed the damp towel, and threw open the side door, heading out into the garden.

He found his way back to the willow tree that had soothed away his torment earlier. It was a longer journey than before because every step he took smacked pleasure into him, and he kept pausing to slip his arms more tightly inside his shirts until his sleeves all hung loose and empty and his bare arms caressed and held his bare torso. Every time he brushed his nipples he gasped and then laughed at himself. He lay out the dish towel and sat down on it, feeling the dew soak into the hems of his track pants. He found the brightest part of the sky and stared at it and waited.

He listened to the tape that Graham had made for him years ago, while Graham had been sick in bed for a couple of weeks, bored out of his mind, and with possession and easy use of a four-track recorder for entertainment. Graham had been too weak to play guitar much, so most of the music had been done on a crappy £25 pocket synthesizer, embellished with the rhythmic ticking of two biros on a china plate, a sad soft harmonica, and Graham's wordless, pissy grumbling. It was some of Damon's favourite music in the world.

"I hope you know that," Damon said aloud to the dewy grass, beginning to glisten in anticipation of the sunrise. "God, Graham."

Damon sighed and let his head droop forward onto his chest. When he closed his eyes he saw Graham's smile, Graham's scowl, Graham's blank bored expression transforming instantly into a reluctant, knowing smirk. And then Graham shaking his head, and turning away. Through with Damon. "I wish you were here..."

And then, the best part of the tape, immaculately timed with the first orangy-pink glow at the horizon... _"I'm fucking bored," Graham whines, his voice thick with congestion. Then a series of soft rapid thumpings. Then Graham sighing, drawing in his breath. The thumping stops, then starts again._ At the horizon, the clouds flamed cranberry red. Over the rhythm of the thumping Graham had mixed in a jaunty keyboard melody, like something Damon would write. Ironic bad porno music. _"Gah," says Graham's voice, husky. "Having it off." He sounds frustrated, but also pleased. "King Tosser to the Wank Meister. Czar Onan. Emperor—" His voice breaks faintly, and Damon swears that he can hear Graham licking his lips. At least, he hopes it's his lips. "Emperor of Masturbatoria." Graham's voice breaks into raspy giggles. The thumping, and the melody, get faster._

Damon had at first thought _Should I be offended? How utterly sleazy!_ Graham had been almost entirely out of it for a while, first with the bad flu, then the codeine prescribed to him for the cough that came with pneumonia. He didn't exactly hand Damon the tape and say, "I made this for you. By the way, track five is me jerking off. I hope it turns you on." Maybe he didn't remember having made that particular track on the tape. But Graham had to have; he mixed it himself, editing out the complete rubbish and the mistakes, and when he gave it to Damon, he didn't say anything more than a slurred, "Here, it's a tape I made when I was sick. Don't lose it, OK?" Graham's solo effort.

"Eh, fuck," came Graham's voice through Damon's headphones and into Damon's ears and into his brain. He knew the song by heart, he knew the melody, the harmony, the scratchy rustling sound that replaced the thumping, the forceful, if quiet, grunt of Graham reaching orgasm, with no particular musical emphasis placed in it or anything; it was just another sound effect, like digital ducks or the shipping report.

_The most gifted artist of his generation._

Out the corner of his eye, Damon saw a sharp bright flash; he looked up and saw the edge of the sun rising slowly and heavily over the gently meandering Suffolk hills on the horizon. Damon opened his mouth as if he could catch the sun in it. On the tape, Graham's finished sigh, and then a jungle onslaught of cheesy pre-programmed beats and harmonica wheezes.

As the sun rose, Damon got up and began to dance.

He wasn't a particularly good dancer; never had been; his overlong legs and arms didn't take well to gliding and shimmying except in the most boyish, graceless way. He had never cared and he didn't care now; he just had to move, go wild, let himself go. He jumped and thrashed and tried to skid on his knees on the damp grass, didn't get far, ended up turning somersaults. He saw that he was headed for the tree, but he decided not to care.

He tumbled straight into it spine first.

The willow shook its weight of evening dew all around and all over and through him. The willow's rain smelled of night air and soaked leaves. Damon fell onto his side, panting, cheerful, joy and love threatening to tear his body to soggy shreds.

But the damp was cold. And his headphones had fallen off. And now his back was harshly bruised. He took hold of the tree trunk and used it to pull himself up.

The walk back to Balfe's house stretched out infinite, giddy, exhausted. His soul rose out the top of his head and swung woozily back and forth over his head. Before he made it back to the gravel path, he had to drop to his knees and retch again, but there was nothing left in his belly to come up.

He went back inside, took off his soaked clothes, and lay naked on the carpet in the drawing room, daring the sunlight to approach him. He cackled. He couldn't keep his hands off himself. He had barely touched the thrilled skin of his upper thigh when the first orgasm came.

_This is why I like E - oh God oh yes oh God!_

He began to feel raw. Dirty. His belly was soaked with semen and yet he didn't stop. _More. Another. Another. YES! Don't stop. Wank yourself bloody. You should tape this and hand it to Graham._ "Don't lose it," he'd say, savouring the guilt and paranoia in Graham's eyes, knowing that he'd know. _You wanted to share something intimate with me? Well, comin' back atcha, and with better vocals, too._

 _Wait... Why do I_ want _to upstage Graham? Why does it matter to me, even a tiny iota, that I'd provide a better wank tape than Graham did? Why am I so jealous and loathsome?_

The sunlight dared to touch him.

***

Damon stood in the shower, gulping water as it ran into and out of his mouth, until the water ran cold.

He covered himself in every clean towel he could see and came back into the house, now merrily lit with bright morning sunshine. In daylight, Balfe's house already bore the signs of his destructiveness - his muddy footprints on the carpets and wood floors and tile, his grotty piles of dirty clothes and the sparkling spilled E powder on the table. He spared a moment to throw his clothes into the washer and add a cupful of washing powder, then leaned back against the gently purring machine, desperately drawing breath.

He slid down onto the floor, unable to leave the washer. When the wash cycle began, the subtle rocking soothed him and calmed his ragged breathing. He struggled to keep his eyes open, even though everything he saw was sagging out of shape, like a melting life-sized candle of a posh country house. _I must stay awake,_ he thought. _I have to go swim._

He closed his eyes and sagged himself.

_Melting I'm melting I'm going to run away_

There was no way he could relax and no way he could move. He lay paralysed, his heart pounding a thousand times a minute in his chest, too big for his lungs to get enough air. He felt dizzy from the lack of oxygen, gazing wistfully at the accumulation of black and glistening stars that crowded the edges of his vision. Behind the stars, the world glowed so bright, but all the time, the black stars increased, thickening, blacking out everything.

On the surface of each star shone a fragment of memory, coming together like a magic-eye image, and suddenly - _oh of course_ \- they formed a single picture.

***

The last Blur tour paused in New York for a week while the band sorted out their press. They knew it was going to be rough still; they had no U.S. hit to propel interest in them, and it was difficult facing a wall of indifference in the biggest music market in the world when the British press made headlines out of the contents of Damon and Justine's rubbish bins.

After a few 18-hour days of video interviews and radio station promo spots, the group had had enough. Balfe forced Dave into handling the interviews, since he'd gotten off so easily in the months before, and told Damon, Graham, and Alex to have a day to themselves in the city. Graham immediately disappeared into the East Village punk-folk-jazz-avant scene, relishing his anonymity, and Damon took it upon himself to drop in on the Beastie Boys' New York studio. Alex, intrigued by the strange pop aspect, tagged along to provide sarcastic commentary and keep the wind from Damon's sails.

The Beastie Boys were not in that day, but lots of their instrumentalist cronies were, and they had no particular prejudice against (nor worshipful interest in) the two Britpop gods. They set Alex up with a standup bass and Damon with maracas and a conga drum, then began to ply them with grass and horrible cheap American beer in forty-ounce bottles.

In the evening, while Alex half-nodded off in his corner, being coddled by heart-breakingly cute, buxom New Jersey X-Girls, the instrumentalists insisted that Damon play basketball with them. And then, to make it up to him after his humiliation, they invited him and Alex to a show that night. Alex was too sodden to resist, and Damon accepted eagerly, his natural hunger for new experiences sharpened by a day's exposure to organically produced hip-hop sounds.

Truth be told, Damon didn't pay any attention to the show itself, being caught up in the whirlwind backstage. Everyone was there - it was like a reunion party for rap music luminaries, and the real ones, not the shiny Hammer/Bobby automatons that Damon had despised as a teenager, but real musicians wearing extraordinary clothes and talking in extraordinary voices. It was overwhelming. Damon kept glancing over at Alex, who just kept smiling the same fixed smile. _He's terrified,_ Damon realised, unsure of whether to feel guilty or to savour every second of it.

"Hey Albarn," someone said, "You wanna meet Missy Elliott?"

Of course he wanted to meet Missy Elliott. Even in a world where hip-hop was changing into something more radical and less dogmatic all the time, she was extraordinary. She worked with the best people, dropped the smartest rhymes, wrote incredible music that Damon listened to only on headphones so that no one would know he was listening to something so seemingly foreign to him. But there was nothing foreign about Missy Elliott to him. There was only something so very, very right.

He was slouching and shaking like a schoolboy, clutching Alex's hand for support, when he was brought before her. He had always wondered if she'd be big and fat in person, overwhelming, frightening, but she was just a larger girl with a gorgeous face and a wicked twinkle in her eye. "It's good to finally meet you," she said to him. "I'm a big fan of yours." She shook his left hand.

Damon nearly swooned. "Of _mine_? But  that's impossible," he stammered, giggling and blushing and feeling about eight years old.

"No, I like Blur," she insisted. "It's real different. We both real different from the average." She hadn't yet let go of his hand; she clasped it between both of hers and squeezed it gently, reassuringly.

Immediately he relaxed. "That's great," he chuckled. "I'm kinda drunk. Sorry."

"No, that's all right... shit, I'm kinda drunk too." She laughed. "You know what? It's too loud in here."

"Um," said Alex out of nowhere, and Damon realised that he was still gripping Alex's hand in his right one. Damon hastily let go and shoved both hands in his pockets. Alex gave a tiny grimace of relief. "I'm gonna, er, get back to the hotel. I'm a bit tired out. All this relaxing. 's done me head in."

Damon blinked at Alex, and they enjoyed a moment of psychic rapport. Damon only had psychic rapport with Alex, for some reason; never anyone else. It was a good thing they had it, though, or Damon would have kicked him out of the band over stupid misunderstandings several different times in the past. Alex did feel tired, but it was only the kind of tired that came from being completely out of his element. He knew good and well that he had nothing in common with any of the people at the club, outside of a healthy enjoyment of alcohol and cannabis, and he'd had plenty of both all day. And he was utterly intimidated by Missy Elliott; she was most decidedly female, but nothing approaching a sex object or a mum, and that was about as far as Alex's female vocabulary went. But he couldn't dismiss her entirely; she was too powerful. The only option for him was to get away before he embarrassed himself or Damon, and he could feel how happy Damon was and didn't want to spoil it. Damon cocked his head slightly, picking up all of this in a fraction of a second. _Good on you, Alex._ "Right, get home safe, all right?" he replied. "I'll be along eventually."

"Ring the hotel for a car," Alex reminded him. He turned his multi-watt smile on Missy. "It's very nice to meet you."

"Yeah, likewise," she replied, grinning. Damon glanced at her, and saw that she'd read the psychic fax as thoroughly as he had, and had no negative judgement against the bassist. "Peace."

"Yeah, cheers," nodded Alex. He gave one last flick of an eyelid to Damon - _Take care of yourself_ \- and then disappeared into the crowd, his sleek black hair swiftly lost in a sea of basketball players.

Damon turned back to Missy. "It is loud, isn't it?" he said. "D'you want to get out of here?" He had never used that line as anything but a pick-up before, and it sounded a little odd to him. But somehow he knew that Missy would understand.

"Yeah, let's go get some champagne," said Missy.

Over frosty tulip glasses in some dark and swanky hotel bar, Damon just couldn't shut up. He felt the way he wanted to feel when he was in therapy, having his head shrunk for £200 an hour, but he never did. He spilled everything about the tour, the band, the records, the records yet to come, the agony and thrill of composing for a rock band, a string section, a brass combo, an orchestra. She smiled and nodded, not with a bored kind of patience, but a fascinated kind, like he was spinning a beautiful web just for her pleasure. His eyes roamed back and forth between her strong brown hands, glimmering with diamond rings and a red-on-black French manicure, and her calm steady face, occasionally sipping from her champagne glass. Damon tipped the bottle into her glass when it was finally empty, and found the bottle dry. "Oh shit, I've killed the bottle," he mourned. "You only had one glass, didn't you? We've got to get another one."

"Why'on't you drink some water, Damon," she suggested.

"Oh yeah..." Damon pawed for his water glass with rubbery fingers. He took a gulp - in a state of drunkeness such that water tasted metallic and foul - and fumbled in his jacket pocket for a cigarette. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to talk your ear off - I usually pay people to listen to me go on like that."

"That's the problem, maybe," Missy suggested. "Your friends are supposed to listen to you."

"Oh, _friends_ ," Damon scoffed. "I work with all my friends. They're now my colleagues. I'm their cash cow. I'm what makes them money. I mean, are they really friends? It's not as though they've nothing to lose if I go mad."

"Of course they got something to lose," Missy said. "They got you. They don't want to lose you. Not Damon the moneymaker. No, Damon the _person_. People love you. Your friends love you."

Damon stared at the table. His eyes stung and itched. He took a hard drag on his cigarette to hide the tears that threatened to ruin a perfectly good champagne drunk with the queen of revisionist hip-hop. "Yeah," he agreed reluctantly.

"Alex. Alex - that's his name, right? Alex James." She smiled at him some more, fluttering her eyelashes in a devastatingly accurate two-second impersonation of the bass player. Damon laughed. "He loves you. He really does. I can tell by the way you two act around each other. Yeah, things're tense right now - who wouldn't be trippin'? All that pressure you under. And of course you mad at each other half the time. Probably more than half the time. But there he is. Holding your hand when you just don't feel strong enough. You gotta remember that."

"He's not even my best friend," Damon blurted.

"Oh yeah? Who is your best friend?" She glanced vaguely at a waiter, and gave an infinitesimal nod of her head. Within seconds, a new bucket with a bottle of champagne in it landed on their table. The sommelier poured an inch into Missy's glass, and she took a sip and nodded her approval. Damon stared at the platinum bubbles rising frantically to the surface. "Is he in the band?"

"I don't know," said Damon. "I don't - I mean - well yes, Graham is in the band, but I don't know if he's my best friend. Justine's my best friend. But Graham's also my best friend."

"Justine's your girlfriend?"

"Yeah." Damon smiled. "You might have seen her on MTV." He hummed a few bars of "Connection".

Missy raised her eyebrows. "Oh, _that's_ your girlfriend?" she asked surprised.

"You're obviously not that big of a Blur fan," Damon said wryly, lifting his own refilled glass.

He just couldn't offend Missy Elliott. She just laughed at him. "No, I like Blur _songs;_ I don't know about the rest of the shit. I like to experience my music without getting other people's opinions about what's going on mixed up in it. Ya dig?" Missy shrugged. "What's the problem there, little boy?"

"'Little boy'?" Damon echoed, shaking his head. "Is that what I am?"

"Yeah, of course you are," she replied softly, as if nothing could be plainer. Then she reached across the table and took his left hand in her right, her rings digging into him slightly, but the gentleness of her grip making up for all of it. "There's something wrong."

"She's not here with me," Damon sighed. "She's never with me."

"Is that your choice, or hers?"

"I don't know," Damon said through gritted teeth. "I don't know what she wants. I don't think it's me. But I do think it's me. But she – it's – it's not enough." He shrugged and waved his head a little bit, gripping Missy's hand. "I wanna, you know, kids. Get married and stuff. Have a family like the one I had. She's brilliant. I'd love to see the kids we'll have together. But she –" He shrugged again. "She's got fucking hit pop singles. I mean, not like I don't, but –" 

Missy squinted at him and shook her head. "What you want is not what's gonna work for _her_ ," she pointed out. "Sometimes you just have to accept that love sometimes just ain't enough."

Damon stared at the ground. "I'm not sure what else I can do," he whispered. 

***

Sometimes love just ain't enough _._

Fascinated by the pretty flicker of his butane torch cigarette lighter, the way it scorched the bottom of the spoon, the faint insectile crackle of the melting heroin. He tied off his upper arm with a shoelace dragged from the eyelets of his Nike, thumped the vein on the inside of his wrist with his middle finger. The vein was huge, green, iridescent in the grey daylight, the sun already washed out of it by thickening clouds outside. How could those same clouds that had earlier burned so red and bright have turned into porridge grey that coated the sky?

A brand new hypodermic needle, stripped gleaming and bright from its paper and plastic package, slurped the cooked drug from the bowl of the ruined spoon. He tapped the syringe and shot a tiny droplet from the slanted tip of the needle.

_Amazing that I'm still aware enough to do this right._

There was no missing that vein; it was all he saw, that greenish bulge against the white surrounding flesh, and the keen direct line of the needle resting against it, cold and determined. The Ecstasy egged him on, doubling and redoubling his desire and fascination.

_Just a little pinch_

A tiny prick, for a giant prick.

And nothing mattered anymore. Not the towels no longer protecting his naked skin from the cold tile floor, not the sight of the underside of the kitchen table a jumble of wooden angles and solids, not the sodding clouds, not the press, not Justine, not anything. He let his head droop to the side, touching the floor with his lips.

_I just slip away and I am gone._


	8. some days you do too much

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thirty hours in to his weekend, Damon has taken enough of enough different kinds of drugs to flatten out a lesser man. Not him, though, no sir; he is made of sterner stuff, of weirder stuff, of stuff as volatile and self-destructive as compulsively songwriting nitroglycerine. In that state it's a good idea to call a friend, and a bad idea to take a dip in a swimming pool.

So warm there on the floor. No such thing as discomfort... only curiosity roused Damon from his position, on his back, half underneath the table, to half-crawl, half-stumble his way back into the music room where he'd left his minidisc recorder. A tune that had been nagging him, unresolved, for weeks, had just untangled _that_ noose around that tiny part of his soul (that left thousands upon thousands, crowding his head first thing in the morning or wasted in bars too late at night, or just going to the shops and examining fruit - they were everywhere, these snatches of songs, so many of them knocking around like moths in a lamp, and he only managed to grasp them for brief seconds, or sometimes a few minutes at a time) and he had to at least hum it into to machine's tiny microphone hole. No way could his rubber fingers hold a pencil long enough to draw staff lines. He had pages of garbage lying around from the time that he was a kid, pages of beautiful symphonies, but no matter how hard he stared, they were still just black circles and flags without meaning.

_I might discover a new form of notation..._

His minidisc was where he had left it the morning before, on the small stand next to the piano, along with a few strange magazines and Damon's mobile. Damon let his gaze drape over his phone for a brief, silky moment, like drawing a scarf against a lover's body... "No," he sighed aloud. He was delighted at the sound of his voice, all gravel and velvet, and delicious to his mouth and his ears at the same time. "I sound ... plummy. Like Vincent Price. I can't use the phone. Not now."

Laughing, he grabbed his minidisc and rolled to the floor. _Such a delightful combination - junk and E's, snorted E's and shot junk at that... my head's going to roll right off and end up in the corner there._ He could picture it exactly - sinews twitching from the messily severed neck, possibly whipping around and spewing the room with gore, and laughing hideously, like some Evil Dead zombie. He could not stop laughing. He was seized, hysterical. Even when it hurt, he couldn't stop.

He desperately needed a drink of water. Preferably thirty drinks of water.

Damon drifted through a gossamer-strewn paradise of a house. Even when he stumbled and went sprawling into doorjambs, or the table, he felt it like a dance, a vicious tango trying to break through his magical veil with bruises. He felt what ought to have been pain, but it just wasn't. It got snipped off somehow. It was like being stabbed with a stage prop knife. Eventually he made his way to the kitchen, with several detours to urinate, get his clean laundry out of the washer and put it into the dryer, put his T-shirt and jeans back on, and rest his burning, sweating head against the nice, cool door.

One shuffling foot kicked his works, and they went skidding and flashing across the kitchen tiles. Damon sighed and resolved to get the syringe after he'd had a glass of water. Thirst caked his throat. He couldn't be bothered to get a glass, instead slurping water from his cupped hands, held underneath the tap. _Water tastes so different here than it does in London. Ha hum hum, hmm hmm hmm. Must get the song._

He let his eyes drift closed, and then he was in the music room, sitting on the floor, back against the wall, looping earbud cables around his neck and stuffing the buds into his ears. _What happened?_ he wondered vaguely. _Who cares. Open mouth to emit sound, you genius._

No words yet, just the tune... so damn simple that it annoyed him that it took him so long to puzzle it out. It was quick and pretty, a sneeze after feeling it coming on for over a month. _I thought of it the week before Justine._ He smiled at himself, holding the minidisc recorder against his lower belly. _I'm starting to create a new chronology, too. B.J. and A.J. Good god, that sounds like a crappy twin pop duo from the eighties. I have to come up with something new._

And then he blinked a few times, gazing emptily at the blank white ceiling where subtle, tentative dramas played themselves out in faint flashes and washes of colour. _Something new? For what purpose? Will I survive? Is it my intention to survive?_

_Or isn't it?_

Words of his therapist flashing through his mind. "If you're feeling suicidal, for God's sake call someone." The last session before Damon tossed his Prozac prescription into the bin, sick of the way it made him feel - soft and blobby and powerless. People told him that it did wonders for him, but the compliments dropped off after a few months, and he had problems remembering why he should care about anything. Damon did not have any desire to talk to his therapist right now, not in his current gilded-velvet-draped Vincent Price heroin-plummy tones... but he didn't have any desire to talk to anyone, really. Except maybe Graham, to tell him he'd made a new song...

He didn't want to see the display on his mobile appear when he switched it on, but his eyes were heavy, slow, and stupid, and they lingered on the mobile's display face just long enough to read the time. "Three?" he moaned in despair. He wanted to stare out the window, but the music room was at the centre of the house and there were no windows to the outside. If he was completely still, he could hear the soft patter of rain on the rooftop. "It's three? How long was I... under the table?" He chuckled at himself. "Wait, I'm still under the table...under the weather... in clover and heather... oh, shut _up_."

His fingers on the tiny buttons were as big as elephants. Everything seemed to be running out of him. _Certainly out my nose,_ he thought, wiping his face on the shoulder of his T-shirt. His eyes had been running freely the whole time he was humming the song into the recorder, and he was glad that he wasn't trying to sing lyrics, his voice being all thick and choked up. "I am _not_ sad," he said aloud, finally managing to bring up Graham's number on the auto dialer. "I have never felt so good in all my life."

Soothing purring pips of ringing massaged Damon's eardrums. He began to hum along to it. It could be the slowest techno song ever. At the third ring the line connected with a faint click and an opening of sound, an invisible door opening into blank darkness.

"Graham? Graham?" Damon bellowed into the phone, suddenly desperate. _I need you I love you oh please be there I need to hear a sane voice_

After a few second's pause, he heard a gruff bark. "Allo? This is Morgan. Fuck off!"

_beep_

No one who didn't know Graham would be able to recognise his voice, and most who weren't were confused by "Morgan." His outgoing voicemail message was an effective deterrent... Graham hated answering the phone... Damon kept screaming. "Are you there? Please? Are you there? Graham! Please answer! Please pick up the phone, Graham! Please! My God!" Damon scraped his hand across his clammy face. His core body temperature dropped a thousand degrees and now he radiated ice through the room... frost crackled across the floor and up the walls, riming the piano, cracking the brittle pages of the magazines, silvering over the glass on the gold records and the framed gig posters. "Graham, I wrote you a song... D'you wanner 'ear it? You can 'ave it... It's yours, mate... I dun' wan' it... " He broke down in further hysterical laughing, grief and despair clutching his liver with steel pincers. "I can't use it where I'm going... Remember what you said? 'I owe it to myself, and I owe it to you lot...'"

The phone slipped out of his hand and onto the floor, making a nearly inaudible thump on the carpet. The soft shirring of the rain on the roof tiles swelled into a multi-toned climax. Damon felt relaxed and distant, every detail softened by a haze of blunted sensation, swamped under a black moat of resignation.

He picked up the minidisc and untangled more nooses.

***

Damon dangled his legs into the slightly cool water of the swimming pool. It wasn't a very big pool, longish and narrow, a pool for swimming exercise laps. Damon liked it for that, though he hardly needed to concentrate on getting enough exercise. He rubbed the water into his skin, trying to adapt himself to the temperature, but that method would not work with fat, cold little raindrops falling out of the sky and wicking all the warmth right out of him.

He was on his third dose of heroin, and his first slim line of cocaine, trying hard to keep the psychedelic crash from overtaking him. The LSD had begun to wear off at last, the Ecstasy had moved into the uncomfortable and melancholy stage, and the 2CB seemed like a dream of distant times. There would be enough heroin to last him until morning, if he kept taking it at this rate.

Morning.

Damon swished the water through his legs. He took a good deep breath, and let himself slip into the deep end.

He touched the bottom of the pool with his toes before he was buoyed upward again, and he let out his breath in a huge blast once he broke through the surface again. He was surprised at his buoyancy - he felt like all his organs were made out of lead, tin clockworks, rusted and still, heavy as a sunken treasure. But Damon floated. He slid under the surface again, made a somersault, and came back up again. The very surface of the water seemed electric, and the depths of the water itself glowingly warm. Raindrops soaked through his wet hair and onto his scalp. _Acid rain, eating through my skin... We've killed the trees and dug up the coal and now we're left with poison clouds and pointless pop music..._ He ducked his head back underneath the water and began the crawl back to the other end.

It came too soon, and Damon pushed off the other end and raced himself back to the deep side. _If I swim fast enough, maybe I can keep the shit out of my mind... maybe I can outrun it..._ Giddy with success, he dove to the bottom of the pool and turned a few more somersaults underwater.

_I'd better go up for air pretty soon..._

_No. Don't bother. It's up there. Waiting for you. The scaries. The evils. The world. Stay down here where it's warm and liquid and quiet._

His lungs screamed for air, and he couldn't keep himself from rushing back to the surface, breaking through it like a balloon, gasping and thrashing when he actually got up. As soon as he felt regulated again, he took another great gulp of air and descended again.

This time, no acrobatics. He just tucked into himself, arse-down, and let himself sink as far as he could. The pool was warmest at the bottom, near the vents that circulated heated water. Damon gazed at the silvery trail of warm bubbles trailing from one of the vents, dumbstruck at the idea that the ditties that bounced around his head like numbers in a bingo machine could have paid for such a thing. _But it's so stupid,_ he thought in wonder. _It's so dumb. Anyone could do it. I just don't know why they don't. Don't they hear it? Haven't they got any sense of how tones fit together?_

The silvery bubbles blurred, then ceased altogether. The desired temperature had been reached, and the pool heaters could now take a rest. Damon closed his eyes and uncurled, floating back to the surface, and rested there, lying on his back. If he turned over once in a while, the rain didn't bother him as much. He was warm all through his heavy clockwork bones.

Behind the soupy clouds, a smudge of pearl hinted at a moon, though there wasn't enough detail to be able to tell the phase. Damon never knew the phase of the moon anymore unless he was startled by a full moon. Alex would know the phase; he had it on his watch. "I'll get a replacement watch with moon phases," Damon said. "And a compass."

_And you'll do what with it, genius? Go sailing on the high seas in search of invaders from the moon? Why would you need a fancy watch when you'll be in a small box with no windows? The studio, the marriage bed, the coffin... what's the difference? Nothing you can do to avoid it, mate. Death is there. Right behind you and getting closer all the time. Smartest choice is to turn around and face it, before you embarrass yourself further._

"And not by drowning, either," he added aloud, drifting to the edge of the pool, borne there by fresh currents of warm water coming from one side. He pulled himself out of the water, almost too weak to lift his thousand tons of lead core. He managed just enough to fling himself onto the pool's narrow edge, and lie there, one foot still dangling in the water, gasping for breath. "I'm already dying," he whispered to himself. "I can't stop myself from dying."

***

He put on his clean, dry, warm jeans, T-shirt, and hoodie, zipped it all the way up and put the hood down over his damp hair. Sadly, he chopped what was left of the E powder into a rail and snorted it, but he knew that it would have no effect. The coke was all right, though, and he had tons and tons of it - more than he and a passel of mates could put away in an evening of reckless usage. Even so, it wasn't great. Sitting at the kitchen table, hitting line after line, listening to the rain on the bamboo, ought to have been a fantastic indulgence, fit only for a night of either fucking five girls, or fucking the same girl for six hours (only girl who could stand that was Justine, and then only when she was high on coke too), but he couldn't shake the weight of gloom that lay on him. Damon set down his rolled five-pound note next to the silver serving platter, still richly arrayed with sparkling ivory lines of powder, and rubbed the sinuses under his eye sockets. The heaviness had crept up into his face now. His sinuses had been filled with concrete.

Damon stood up and shunted the cocaine back into its plastic bag. Once upon a time, he and Justine had put away a bag of coke like this over the course of a weekend. South of France, between tourist seasons, they had barely left their hotel room except to weave screaming and laughing to the swimming pool, where the lovemaking would continue. Only fistfulls of cash kept them from being thrown out of the hotel. Hours of sex, violent mad smashing of furniture, phone ringing off the hook for room service, Justine and Damon having orgasm-screeching contests at four in the morning. Elastica had just been signed.

Not so long ago, was it? Not so much Before Justine; more During Justine.

What seemed to him, at the time, to be such simple pleasures.

(Justine tying him up in bed, leaving for an agonising hour, then coming back with works, explaining each step to him as she did it, her long golden thighs straddling his belly. "Tie your arm right here. It's best. Wait till the vein rises; if you can't wait, stroke it, don't strike it; that just makes it more tender. Check the needle for bubbles by pointing it up and filling the needle with liquid. You might be in a hurry, but it's not worth dying over. Don't hesitate; slide the needle right in, slightly sideways. The way you've seen it done. Ah... there now, darling, you like that, don't you? I could have guessed. You're always looking for the shortcut to ecstasy." And the next weekend, he doing the same thing to her exactly, with the same silk ropes, with the same worn latex strap, with the same needle, watching her eyes roll up under their velvet lids and wondering if he had looked as beautiful as she did.)

Damon zipped the plastic sack closed, then sniffed the cocaine residue from underneath his fingernails. The back of his head fizzled, like champagne bubbles breaking inside his brainpan.

("I've stopped, Damon," she said, her mouth stern and uncompromising. "You ought to stop too, before someone who you don't want to know finds out. Don't go to rehab. You're not a movie star. You don't have time to throw away on getting your head straight. I mean, c'mon, I know, heroin is fun. Cocaine is fun. But it's not worth it. We have work to do. And I don't want you changing into something that I don't like in the meantime. It doesn't really work with your medications, anyway. You ought to stop now, and I'll look after you. Can I trust you on this?"

He said that she could. And he made a good go of it until he walked in on her in the toilet, and she hastily tried to hide the foil packet in her handbag, but she wasn't fast enough to fool him. All her haste couldn't erase the soft, bitter chemical fumes of melted smack or the smudge of guilt on her face. He said nothing, only offered her a weak smile, left the flat, went to his club, and fucked and got high with someone else.)

Enough coke left on the platter to make a big, long, proper rail, if he spent some time with the razor arranging it just so. Just one more. With one of his rubbery-cold fingers stopping his right nostril, he bent down to the platter with the five-pound note in the left one.

The line went quick; he sat up and snuffed it in, rubbing it into the tissues. More champagne in his brain. "Just one more," he said, opening the bag a little and letting a few milligrams spill onto the dusty surface of the platter. Razor, gaze, roll, stop, sniff.

"Just one more." Tip, razor, roll...champagne.

"Just one more." Tip, razor, snort... champagne. Fainter this time, but still champagne.

"Just one more," he chuckled to himself, knowing it wouldn't be the last. He let a lot of the coke spill out, and cut it into a line twice as wide and twice as long as his last One More. He decided to switch nostrils, as his left one completely lacked sensation, and he treasured the cold, hard ping of the powder, stinging and then going delicious dead numb. The five-pound bill was quite damp and chewy by now, but it'd be enough for this One More, and he had a couple more banknotes still in his wallet.

The monster line went up, punching his sinuses as it went, and Damon sprawled back in his chair, feeling a proper good cocaine rush for the first time all night. _All right! Let's go! Chop chop chop!_ As he leaned forward to grasp the baggie again, he noticed the five-pound note was not just damp and frayed now, but also edged in unmistakable red.

He unfurled the bill and stared at it. Stephenson, the father of railways, wore a red cowl of blood smears. Damon struggled to focus his eyes on it, but found himself instead staring down at the silver platter, lightly being spattered with red rain.

Damon cupped his hand over his nose and carried the platter with him to the kitchen sink, running tap water over it, bitter about losing even a tiny crumb fragment of the cocaine, but wishing to remove the traces of his blood on it. Blood drops landed on his rinsing hands. _I'm still bleeding,_ he thought. _I'd better get a towel or two._

All the towels were back in the bathroom, and he needed to switch on a light to keep from barking his shins on the bidet again. He hunted on the floor until he found a reasonably dry towel, and held it up to his face. When he straightened up again, he faced the mirror, the overhead lights blazing down on him. With the towel covering the lower half of his face, he knew the sight wasn't as bad as it could have been, but still; he had two faintly blackened eyes, a cut in his eyebrow, another one on his forehead; his hair looked like a battlefield on the Rhine. He could swear he could see barbed wire circling his temples. As he lowered the towel slightly, both nostrils ran lines of scarlet blood which soaked the edge of the terrycloth.

"Ah, fuck." His second nosebleed in ... well, he had no idea what time it was, so he couldn't say in how long, but his second nosebleed of the weekend. He clutched the towel to his face, flicked off the bathroom light, and went back to the kitchen. The cocaine made his steps light and tenuous. He grabbed a packet of frozen peas out of the freezer, then settled back at the kitchen table with the bag on the back of his neck. He held the towel up to his face with one forearm while both hands busied themselves with the packet, the lighter, the spoon, and the syringe.

He went back to the drawing room, lay on the couch, drew a blanket over himself, rested the frozen peas on his eyes and the bridge of his nose, and tried to relax. The filled syringe rested lightly in his left hand, folded over his chest. _Only a little while longer... my nose won't stop bleeding till I relax... good thing I wasn't trying to snort heroin this weekend, or I'd be fucked._ Damon smirked, congratulating himself for having a large stock of sterile insulin needles, still left over; hidden from Justine all that time, in a box on the top shelf of his coat closet. Or maybe she had known, and left him alone about them. Maybe she had been hoping that he'd overdose, and she could become another glamorous Pop Star Heroin Widow.

The packet of peas gave him a terrible headache, so he took it off and set it on the floor. He held the ends of the shoelace in his teeth, stroked the vein in his arm, bruised, tender, and unhappy. He selected a fresh spot, further up the arm, where the vein wasn't as big or obvious, but the bruising hadn't spread. Still, he drew in his breath in a hiss at how much the tiny injection stung, how much he could feel it all through the marrows of his bones, the hollow spongy parts soaking up the pain.

And then nothing was wrong, nothing hurt, the bruises were nothing, the black eyes were nothing; he floated warm and lifeless and contented, stroking his furry belly with his fingertips.


	9. my blank heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What every great drug overdose tale needs - an intervention from those closest. C'mon, c'mon, c'mon — get through it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to post fanfic for Christmas - and this one goes out to my most loyal reader, essexgirl. Thank you for hanging in there with me, and with a wassailing bowl, I drink to thee.
> 
> For G.M.

_That horrible sound. Must stop that horrible sound._

Damon flailed one arm out, trying to find the alarm clock and shut it off, but his hand slapped only air. He rolled over and cracked his eyes open, looking for the alarm clock, but he saw only an unfamiliar carpet, slightly smudged with muddy footprints. The sound continued, growing louder and more aggravating; a tinny series of cascading beeps, too gentle to be an alarm clock, but definitely demanding attention.

At last his eyes fell on his mobile phone, lying in the middle of the carpet, flashing faintly pale alien green from some light source underneath it. He stretched out one leg and reached for the phone with his foot, drawing it closer, and finally reaching down to pick it up.

Holding the bricklet of plastic and wires up to his head hurt as much as being kicked. "Who is this?" he rasped into the mouthpiece, wondering if he was even audible.

"Damon Albarn? Z'at you?"

"Missy," he replied, sitting up, patting himself down, making sure he wasn't naked or hanging out or looking absurd. Then he remembered that she wasn't actually there, that he was talking to her on the phone. "Why are you calling me?" The drawing room hung lit with dim, smoky, pre-dawn light. He'd been asleep again.

"Why am I calling-!" Her voice was a bark of disbelief and annoyance. "Why am _I_ calling _you_? Now, that's a really good question, comin' outta you, little boy."

"What'd'you mean," Damon mumbled, sliding back down onto the couch. Everything that hurt, hurt more than he could possibly imagine, especially his back, the abrasions along his spine where he'd skidded into that tree.

"You don't remember calling my house, babbling like a crazy fuckin' lunatic?"

"No," said Damon with a soft, agonised laugh. "I'd remember that."

He heard her draw her breath in through her nose. "You blow up my phone, about fourteen hours ago, makin' no sense and talking death and dismemberment. At least, I think that's what you were saying. I'll play you the tape sometime. It's somethin' else. Now, what I hope is that you're kidding."

Damon sunk into the couch and dragged the blanket up over his head. In the warm dark that smelled of his sweat and his breath, shielded from even the vaguest hint of daylight, he could kid himself that he was safe. "No" he sighed. "No, I'm not kidding. And no, I don't remember calling you. And if you've got a tape of me babbling incoherently, I'd really appreciate it if you-"

"Excuse _me_ , little boy. This is _me_ giving you a piece of _my_ mind. You better shut up and listen. Now, I got a lot of patience for you. You in the middle. You facin' a big bad transition and it's sink or swim. It's go crazy and let the bastards win, or you stick it out and suck it up and show 'em what you're made out of. This is not the time when you be callin' Missy out of the blue, threatenin' harm to yourself. You too old for that shit, Damon. You know how scared I was?" Her voice instantly softened into angora concern, and he choked back a sob of remorse, not very successfully. "I was callin' all over London tryin' to figure out where that call come from. You lucky I didn't get you in trouble - I couldn't reach your phone, it was out of service or somethin', so I called the only other number of someone I know who knows you and asked them if they recognised the source phone number cos that British shit don't make no sense to me. Fortunately he did, and he told me to try your phone again. So I did. I thought it might be too late. Don't scare me like that, Damon."

"So how did you... how did you get a number in the first place?"

"It's called caller I.D.? It's pretty cool; you might want to check it out yourself. Just in case one of your friends gets suicidal on you and calls you up and leaves you fucked up messages from someplace that's not their home. Or their cell."

"I called you on _Balfe's_ phone?"

"Yeah, you're a genius, like they all say. You don't even remember." She seemed to accept this, in a disbelieving way.

"What did I say?"

"Fuck it, I don't care to repeat it. In fact, I don't think I can. You on drugs?"

Damon answered with a soft explosion of air from his nose. "Agghh!" he howled at how much that hurt. The tears that ran down inside his nose stung like acid. "Who did you call?" he said at last, sobbing softly, wiping his cheeks on the blanket.

"Alex James," she confessed, a little reluctantly.

"Alex?! Oh, no."

"You better be glad I ain't call your record label. I called your house first, but there's nobody there. Where's Justine?"

Damon tried to say something, but instead lapsed into bitter chuckles. "Huh huh, huh huh." They segued beautifully into and out of his sobs. "No Justine," he replied. "She's gone."

"Mmm-hmm," said Missy, her voice cleared of sentiment. "Yeah," she said, now very matter-of-fact. "So you feel like you'd better go end it all while the getting is good. You figure you'll bury your head in the sand, and if you're lucky, you'll choke to death before anybody figures out that you're gone. I'm here to tell you it doesn't work that way. No matter how much pain you think you're in now, it's _nothing_. There's so much worse ahead of you. And you know what? You're strong enough to take the pain. Millions and billions of people do every single day. They take it. And they live as long as God put 'em on earth to live."

"Missy, I'm not a Christian, don't lay that God shite on me, especially not right now."

"Fine. So you're not a Christian. So Buddha figures something out for you. Or whoever. The world figures out what it wants to do. You figure out your place in it. But you don't destroy the work that is yourself. How do you know what's gonna happen in the future? OK, you and Justine, you were together for how long?"

"Eight years," Damon bit out.

"Eight years. Yeah, that seems like a long time. 'Cos you're thirty. Don't try to pull a fast one on me, you're thirty, even if the calendar don't say so - I bet you done aged ten years since you started on this nonsense. Your life is less than half over. So it's a chunk. And right now you can't imagine ever being as happy, ever again. Or happier. But honey, there's that possibility. There's that chance that not only is everything gonna be all right, that everything's gonna get better."

Damon roughly wiped the wet faceplate of the phone against his hoodie and then put it back up to his cheek. "Missy, oh God, Missy, the hurting won't stop."

"No, the hurting won't stop," she agreed softly. "It won't ever stop for good. But it also won't last for every single second of the rest of your life. You gotta give yourself a chance to keep goin'. There's been so many times I been low. Oh, honey, I been low; you got no idea. The one thing you gotta remember is that you can't do it alone. And I'm not talking about a girlfriend or a lover. I'm talking about _everyone_. We're all strung up in this web, and everything we do affects everything else. Every _one_ else. Now you've got people who would do anything to help you. Listen to them. Don't be afraid to accept it when they offer you help. Don't be too proud. Damn you, little boy, so your girlfriend broke up with you, and now everybody knows it. Big fuckin' deal. It happens in kindergarten every day. It makes as much sense for you to be talkin' about erasing yourself as it does for a five-year-old to shoot himself because he didn't get any valentines. You got better things to do."

"You called Alex," Damon remembered with a start. "What did he say?"

"Oh, he should be showing up any minute now, actually. I told him what you sounded like, and he was all Johnny On The Spot. I just got off the phone with him and he was in his car on the way before he hung up."

"Oh, shit," Damon hissed. "Coming alone?"

"I am not your social director, Damon Albarn. I don't know what he's doin'. He just told me he knew where you at, since I don't, and that he was gonna come snatch your ass up and smack you stupid and take your ass home. Do I need to stay on the phone with you till he gets there?"

Damon had begun to shake badly all over, and pain sliced and pounded every part of his body. "No," he told her. "No, I mean, I'm not in any danger to myself right now. I can hardly move." He yawned expansively, stifling a yelp as he stretched his overtaxed jaw ligaments and jostled his sore nasal sinus. "I think I'll just go back to sleep - I mean, what time is it?"

"It's one in the morning here. One fifteen. So, six fifteen there."

"God, Missy, I'm sorry," Damon groaned. "I'm sorry I had to drag you into this. I mean it's not like you particularly care to get involved."

"You know what?" Missy retorted. "I _do_. I do care. I'm glad you called me instead of doing something stupid. I'm glad you thought of me. You my little cousin, Damon. I care about you. I know you can't get your head around that idea, but I care. I want you to keep makin' music and inspirin' people. Inspirin' _me_. You can get through this, and what's better, you can use it. Hang onto this intensity and squeeze it dry, and when you've gotten some Good out of it, it won't haunt you anymore and you'll be free. You hear?"

"Yeah," said Damon. "Thanks. I..." He hesitated, chose his words carefully. "I appreciate it. I'll make it up to you, I promise."

"I love you too, little boy," she said, a faint hint of laugh in her voice.

***

Damon scrambled to put all the drugs gear back into the briefcase, but he couldn't scramble properly; he was trapped in sticky amber, in tar, in slowly drying concrete. Every moment took a thousand times longer than it meant to. After a few minutes of bad fumbling, he gave up and slid to the floor.

In the foil packet remained a tiny square slice of heroin. And he wasn't sure where the energy or the dexterity came from, but he stripped a new needle from its packet, heated the junk in the same destroyed spoon, sucked it up through a new wad of cotton gauze, divested his other shoe of its lace.

The pain was almost worth having felt just so that he could more intensely savour it being stripped away, like the dead flaky peel from a sunburn, leaving the new flesh of his soul to smart and sting in the new air. Then he felt the soft swaddle of the heroin-pleasure blanket tighten, paralysing him, drawing a black woolly veil over the yellowish grey light of morning.

 _Too much!_ he thought in a distant analogue of panic. _Too much! If I die, Missy Elliott is going to kill me!_

_Ah, Missy would never do that. Nobody would begrudge you this kind of contentment and joy. Your mother would buy drugs for you if she knew they made you feel like this._

_Yes. That's true. Just give in. Just relax. I'll be fine, wherever I end up._

He ended up face down, on the bathroom tiles.

Being held too tightly under his arms, being lifted up, being spoken to in low, soothing tones. "Right, that's it. Get it all out. See if you can hit the toilet this time. Please. God. Hit the toilet this time."

Damon tried to turn his head. Instead of pivoting, it flopped loose and boneless onto his shoulder. He would have liked to speak, to scream, to question, but only a faint moan escaped through his closed lips. He could vaguely taste the vomit on his tongue. Something tapped his face, kept tapping harder and harder, became sharp slaps. He tried to raise his arm to try to fend it off, but the arm never really moved. "Wake up, you fucking dickhead," someone said. "Open your eyes. Look at me."

A shaggy head came poking into Damon's field of vision; dark mop of hair, unshaven suntanned cheeks, bright brown button eyes, a tight smirk. "'Allo, Dez!" the face said ingratiatingly, far too loud. "Being ill, are we?"

Damon let his head fall forward again, and unleashed sick in the general direction of the toilet. Most of it went straight in, but a bit of it splashed the rim. It was greenish-grey and smelt horrid. "I ... never ate anything," Damon managed to slur out.

"No, you didn't, obviously," Alex replied, his voice softer, didactic. "That's just plain bile. That's your stomach acid right there. It'd be better if you kept that inside you, but since you can't... Feeling better? Fucking smackhead."

"Let go my pits," Damon mumbled. "You're pinching my underarm hair."

"Gonna be sick anymore?"

"No," Damon vowed. He was released, and slid down onto the floor, resting his face against the toilet bowl. It, at least, was colder than he was. The nausea roiled up, but he fought it back down, knowing there was nothing left in his belly to expel. His throat was raw.

He felt a plastic cylinder being pressed into his palms. "Sport bottle," Alex's voice floated in from far away. "Full of plain water. Sip it, please. You have to rehydrate. You look like an old dog's chew toy; it's disgraceful."

Faint voices continued outside of Damon's comprehension. He tentatively let some of the water trickle into the corner of his mouth, and swallowed it with difficulty, his ravaged esophagus reluctantly accepting the fluids. "I'll be fine," he said aloud to nobody in particular. "I'll be fine. Just leave me here."

"Wot's he on about?" Another voice, familiar, not Alex's.

"Drugged nonsense. You know. Some kind of crack-fuelled protestations of strength and ability." That was Alex. They had ganged up on him.

"Who'zat?" Damon croaked.

"'Ere, fuck off," said the other voice.

"It's Graham, dumb-arse," said Alex.

Damon raised his eyebrows against the cold porcelain. "Graham," he remarked. "Good. Did you get my message?"

"Yeah," said Graham sounding more like himself - bitchy and reluctant, but terribly sweet at the same time. "I hadn't bothered to check until Alex called me. I was asleep. I mean, it's six in the morning. I was asleep."

"Let's get him someplace softer," said Alex.

Between the two of them, they carried Damon's dead-weight bulk from the bathroom to one of the untouched guest rooms, and settled Damon gently on the bed. Damon still floated on the heroin dose, and lying down, in a soft, warm, flower-fragrant bed, he let out a caw of orgasmic pleasure. Graham swiped Damon's forehead with a face towel, dampened with clean hot water and a touch of wintergreen rubbing alcohol. Damon's hoodie had been unzipped, and the collar of his T-shirt stretched out in lieu of taking it off entirely. Damon gazed hazily at Alex and Graham, wanting to just make love to them both, shining like gorgeous gilded princes in the weak morning sunlight, and exchanging smirking, but concerned glances. "Thank you," he gushed. "I love you. You are the best."

"What're you doing," Graham muttered.

"Don't, Graham," Alex said.

Graham paid no attention. "No, I mean it. What're you doing? What is this drama? Why must you do everything on the hugest possible scale?"

"Remember the window, Graham," Damon said.

Graham leaned back, his cheeks going pale. "That's not fair..."

"It's fair," Damon replied, raising his eyebrows. "It is fair. I understand you."

Graham stood up, shaking his head. "You don't understand a fucking thing," he shot back, and stormed out of the room.

Damon gazed at Alex, who shrugged. "It _is_ pretty early for him," Alex said by way of explanation. "He's worried sick. So'm I." He squinted at Damon, who sighed and sank deeper into the bed. "I mean, really, really, Damon. You can't do this to us. Remember how angry you were at Graham when he pulled that stunt he did? That's nothing compared to how he feels right now. I mean, he's just livid. He was sick himself on the way over, just from sheer anxiety. He feels guilty. He feels responsible. I mean, you called out to him for help so many times, so explicitly, and he just turned his back on you. He feels like shit."

"Whereas you..."

"Whereas _I_ got to deal with Missy Misdemeanour."

"Oh, aye," Damon said with a grin. He rolled his head on the pillows. He was chilled to the centre of his heavy lead core, but too weak to reach for blankets, and a film of sweat rising on his skin. "Did she give you shit?"

"No, she didn't," Alex said slowly, serious for once. He didn't meet Damon's gaze. "She was really concerned."

"Fuck!" came Graham's scream from one of the other rooms. Alex looked up, and Damon struggled to keep his eyes open, watching Graham come skidding back into the bedroom, holding up foil packets, plastic needle wrappers, and empty syringes. "You get me up at six in the morning so I can clean up your fucking drug paraphernalia! Your fucking sharps! There's powder all over the kitchen table! Blood all over the place! There's bloody towels and frozen peas in the drawing room! Frozen peas, Damon! What kind of fucked-up drug casualty abuses _frozen peas_?!"

Alex raised his eyebrows at Damon. "Were you abusing frozen peas?" he asked innocently.

Graham threw up his hands and bolted from the room again.

"Who else did you call?" Damon wondered softly, coughing a little.

"I called Dave Rowntree, of course," Alex said, locating the washcloth with the wintergreen essence, and he lay it gently across Damon's clammy forehead, even though it had gone cold. Damon broke out in tooth-clacking shivers. "I told him I'd call him once I figured out what was up with you, and that he can get in the gauntlet line to kick your arse when you get back to town. And... er... get out of hospital."

"Hospital," Damon repeated slowly.

Alex smiled a little out the corner of his mouth. "You're going to the hospital in Burwell," he said, almost apologetically. "You OD'd. We walked you around for a good half hour before we could even get you to throw up. You were dead to the world. Blue, you know. It's best if as few people as possible know about it. Which is why Graham's become the Diary of a Mad Housewife as he tries to clear up the house before we take you in. If everything's all right, you'll only be there for a few hours while they stitch you back up and hydrate you an' that."

"Not something I can just... go home..."

"No," said Alex. "You're going to the hospital, and you're going to tell them all the drugs you took, so you don't have an adverse reaction. 'Cos that would be bad, and Graham would be really annoyed if we got you to the hospital and then they killed you with some morphine or something. You don't have to tell me, but you do have to tell them. And meanwhile I'll be doing some greasing of palms to make sure this doesn't make it into the press. You can owe me back."

Damon closed his eyes and drifted away on the soft tide of Alex's words, but awakened again with Alex pinched Damon's earlobe viciously with his fingernails. "Pay attention to me, Damon. Don't go to sleep. You are not allowed to sleep any more until you get to the hospital, and probably not then, either. You've really gone and done it this time."

"How was your American?" Damon grasped for a conversation, shuddering violently. Alex got up, grabbed another blanket from the closet, and tucked Damon in, not too tightly but well. Damon kept shaking, but it wasn't as bad anymore.

Alex shrugged as he tucked the loose edges of the blanket underneath Damon's sides. "I got impatient with her by Saturday morning," he said. "She gave me shit about me having extra cheese on my omelette. I tried to explain to her how I do things, but she just couldn't deal with the fact that I not only ate cheese, I got extra cheese on my breakfast to make it up to myself for getting through an entire Friday night with no drinks. She gave up cheese years ago, apparently, on the advice of her agent. So I had my omelette, with the extra cheese, and I had a double Bloody Mary as well, just to spite her. It was very downhill from there. Still, Friday evening wasn't half bad. She enjoys filthy talk." Alex shrugged. "Eh, well. I'd have probably been better off coming with you after all. What did you do?"

"Everything," Damon mumbled. "Except the methedrine, actually."

"Oh, really? Can I have it then?"

"Alex, you don't take speed."

"I might," Alex retorted, vaguely insulted. "New horizons an' that." He smiled into the distance. "You don't get to take the hedonism crown from me, darling. What about the other drugs?"

Graham returned and interrupted Damon before he could begin remembering. "I'll take him to the hospital," Graham said, wiping his hands on a dishtowel he had looped into the waistband of his jeans. "Alex, you go back to London. Call Rowntree, would you?"

Alex stood up, blinking in the sunlight. "Oh? You think I should?"

"Call Rowntree. Now." Graham's eyes shot angry daggers at Damon.

Damon looked pleadingly at Alex, and Alex got the message and turned to face Graham. "Or what?" Alex challenged.

Graham slipped the cordless land-line phone out of another pocket in his baggy jeans. "Or else I ring Dave Balfe and tell him that you shot smack in his kitchen. And that you got muddy footprints on his nice Afghan rug. And that you were sick in his pool."

"I wasn't sick in the pool!" Damon protested.

"Oh, yeah? Can you prove it?" Graham shot back. Alex shrugged at Damon, indicating his defeat, and sat back down on the edge of the bed, producing his own flashy, top-of-the-line Nokia mobile.

Graham sat on the other side of the bed and took up swabbing Damon's forehead with the face towel again, Graham's rosy mouth working in silent grimace of frustration. Damon reached up and grasped Graham's wrist, then slid their hands together, linking fingers, and squeezed with all his strength. Graham squeezed back a little, then took his hand back and began to wipe Damon's hand with the towel, more roughly than was really justified.

"I want a drink," Graham said bitterly. "Fuck you. I really want a drink. Let's just end the band, so we can both just kill ourselves. It's what you want, isn't it? I'm in if you are."

"Graham–"

Alex handed the phone down to Damon. "David wants to talk to you," he said with vicious delight. Damon sighed, calmed his shuddering long enough to hold the phone in his wintergreen-scented hand, and bring it close to his face.

"Hello?" he croaked.

"Damon?" Dave did not sound amused.

"Dave," said Damon. "All right?" He was still so high, so very high. His body was a wad of aches he couldn't really feel unless he concentrated; all of this, ache, all of it just a bit elsewhere. And yet, that undercurrent of terror.

"Just fine. You all right?"

"Yeah... I mean, no. I will be. All right. I mean. In the end."

"Stupid," said Dave. He sighed. "Don't do it again, OK?" he added, his voice bizarrely neutral.

"Do you even care," said Damon bleakly. Above him, Alex and Graham glanced at each other, but neither of them moved or said anything.

"Stupid," said Dave again. "Stupid fuck. Course I care. I feel... no, I _won't_ feel responsible for this, because it really wasn't up to me. I wish _you_ cared a bit more about the other people in your life, and what happens to be good for them, and what they think, and whether or not there'd be a massive, ever-sucking black _hole_ in their lives without you. That's all."

"Sorry, Dave," Damon whispered.

"You'll be eating shit for months over this," Dave said, maintaining his calm, controlled voice. "I won't make it any worse. Ring me tonight when you get home, or else in the morning. We have some things to talk about. I mean - have you ever considered that this isn't just your band? How _we_ might want something different? Have you ever thought that, or are we just a tea set for you? Just your toy soldiers? Because we're fucking not, mate; we're people; we're musicians; we have our own ideas. And we might not want to work on _your_ ideas anymore. Ever thought of that?" Dave cut himself off with a faint scoff. "Sorry. I'm rambling and I'm venting. But I am really, really significantly angry with you right now, Damon Albarn. I'm serious. You're acting like a spoilt Victorian child and I don't like it. I've worked too hard to watch you throw it all away. I've worked too hard, and Graham and Alex have as well, and Balfe, and Andy, and everyone who cares about this. And you'd grind it all into the dirt and piss on it and say it's not good enough. Yeah, I'm a bit angry. But, yeah, ring me when you get home."

"All right, Dave. Cheers, Dave."

"Give us Alex back."

Damon held up the phone to Alex, who accepted it and began to murmur incomprehensibly into it as he walked out of the room. Damon let his eyes close again, and Graham said nothing, patting his forehead gently with the cold, moist washcloth.

"I wrote a song for you," Damon whispered.

"Yeah? Is it really for me, or is it just some crap you dredged out of the bottom of your files?"

"No, it's really _for_ you," Damon said. "Take it. I'm not trying to steal anything from you... you can throw it away if you want but I really want you to write words for it and sing it and it'll be brilliant because you're brilliant, Graham."

Graham snorted faintly, but he didn't deny it. Damon gripped Graham's wrist again. "You and me, mate," Damon whispered, feeling the black fatigue swamp rising up to swallow him again. "You-and-me-and-Dave-and-Alex. We don't need anything else. We don't need anyone else. We'll make the music together. No more planning and ... horn sections... and Top of the Pops..." He shuddered and hiccupped, no longer sure that his words were even audible. "You... have to help me too... fuck, I'm going to be sick again, sorry—"

At the edges of his perception, he could hear Graham shouting, as if through bales of cotton wool. He couldn't make out the sense of what Graham was saying, but when he felt Graham's desperate hands on his face and his chest, the touch sent cool waves of bliss throughout his body. _I'll be all right,_ he thought. _I'm immortal. The world needs me.  
_

_right, Missy?_

:the end:


End file.
